Brilliant Souls, Sovereign Minds
by VulkansNodosaurus
Summary: Usagi wakes up early for once on the worst day for it, and never meets Luna on the way to school. As a result, Naru is entangled in the Dark Generals' plots, Rei becomes Sailor Mars before the other Senshi awaken, and all of Azabu-Juuban begins to rise - or perhaps descend - into a bizarre new world. But love and justice will stand firm, in any eon. An SF-flavored rebuild.
1. 0,00 - Transit

0.00 - Transit  
6 June 2012

Lit by a starscape's glimmer, two figures dance across a lifeless plain.

The figures are not human, not any being born of Earth, and they would never be confused for such. The spiral arrangement of their tentacles might bring to mind a deformed cephalopod, but the tiny mouths within those tentacles put the lie to that analogy. And occasionally, a line appears that should not, a cut in the fabric of spacetime, and it becomes clear that the dance is far more intricate than merely human eyes could ever comprehend, and performed to a rhythm that spans universes.

Yet perhaps even a human could see, if they had witnessed the final act of the Aethuo civilization, the message encoded in their movements, a message of final defiance.

The dance continues, ever faster, ever less predictable. Wilder motions. More desperate, one might say, but one would be wrong. Desperation implies hope.

The fate of the Aethuo has already been decided.

There are no bones around the partners, no trace of the metropolis that once filled this valley. The buildings have crumbled not to dust, but to nothing. And above the figures, a star goes out, then another, then a growing, coalescing patch of sky turns to inky black.

The Aethuo notice. They can't not notice. Their steps give no indication that they do, though. Not until the darkness has covered the whole sky. Not until a third figure descends from it.

The newcomer is one humans would interpret more easily. The similarity to an Earth cat is truly impressive. And deceptive, of course. For the new arrival is not a non-sapient beast confined to realspace, but one of the most powerful beings in the universe. The Aethuo both know, in the cores of their ethereal bodies, that she could destroy them both effortlessly.

Effortlessly - but not instantaneously. And so her arrival here is already a victory of sorts.

"Why are you dancing?" the arrival asks, with a petty curiosity. The question is posed in a strange, ancient Ceraken language.

No response comes. That is a star-sized provocation in and of itself.

"You lost," the false cat says, as if she doubts that the Aethuo understand this. "You refused our aid, and Chaos has devoured your species whole."

Still, there is no response. The newcomer grants a long pause before her third question.

"Are you celebrating?! Are you proud that you have led a whole civilization to doom?"

That, at last, provokes a response. Only one of the Aethuo speaks, though even the newcomer cannot know which one. "That you do not understand why we dance," the answer comes, "is proof enough that we were right to reject your tyranny."

"Would it truly have been worse?" The newcomer's words are more gracious now. "Do you truly call the Shadow worse than Chaos?" She is seeking an angle - of recruitment, perhaps. But more than that, of understanding.

Ignorance is defeat. And the Shadow is at war, as it has been for a very long while.

"True, we died," an Aethuo responds. "But before that, we lived."

Another neural architecture; and, the newcomer concludes, another meaningless failure. She has wasted her time, coming here. She has heard this sort of denial plenty of times. Lesser than she would have expected from the Aethuo.

But even as she processes the response, she misses the chance to catch the moment the two figures, now distinct, say, in High Aethuo and at impossible speed, phrases that can be approximately translated as -

"Oethaoz Crisis, Make Up!"

"Aethuo Crisis, Make Up!"

Sailor Mau does not say anything. She has long ago surpassed the need for even a subvocalized phrase to bring the full power of her Star Seed to the fore. Instead, she attacks, and is more than slightly surprised when that does not instantly end the battle.

The Aethuo Senshi must have been far, far stronger than the Shadow had known.

She will defeat them regardless. That much is mathematically certain.

(And because she will defeat them here, there are a million other worlds she will not be on.)

But for now, under a sky of pure black, three figures clash, and the sparks from their battle give the world of Aethuo its last light.

* * *

Billions of light-years away, the clouds are briefly clearing away from the sky above Shiba Koen Junior High School. They will return - so much will return - but for now, the windows light up, brightening the gym's exhausting colors.

Aino Minako, already in a hopeful mood, barely notices the sun. She remembers looking at it through black glasses, during the previous moment of clear sky during science class, but the transit didn't impress her. True, it happens only once every century; if it happened more often, she thinks, it wouldn't be remarked on at all.

Instead, she focuses on her routine, to the extent that she can focus at all. Today, she considers. She'll give Higashi the letter today.

Despite the distraction, she soars through the routine. Perhaps it's muscle memory, or perhaps it's the buoyancy of love. A twist there, a grasp there - she knows people are watching her, but she does not process it, not even the impressed gasps. And then she jumps one last time to dismount, revolving, exuberant, free -

And hears a squeal upon contact with the ground, and stumbles on the tail of a cat.

There is laughter. Minako, her flight so rudely interrupted, scowls crimson.

"Hey!" she says. Screams? Screeches? Squeals? At the moment, she isn't sure which, nor does she particularly care. "What's that cat doing here?!"

"That is a good question," Sakura-sensei says, seemingly pondering it for a moment. She can be slow as a tank sometimes, Minako knows; but also implacable as one, when gets going. Thus it is with her shooing the cat away.

The cat sits still for precisely long enough to cause a scene, staring directly at Minako. It is a discomfiting look, the stare of someone certain in their superiority to everyone else in the room. It seems, for a cold moment, that Minako is being sucked into its violet, rippling eyes, or perhaps into the crescent-shaped bald spot above them, that it is hypnotizing her or revealing some inexpressible secret. Then it disdainfully swings its body around, and walks off.

Minako blinks twice, as Sakura-sensei tries fruitlessly to hurry the cat up. Someone throws their shoes at it, but misses and hits Fumiko instead. A fight is incipient. Minako is still staring.

Finally, she shakes her head and decides to try and ignore the entire affair. Being bothered by a cat, really? She is being ridiculous, she decides. Hysterical, even.

At the moment the first punch is thrown, easily blocked by Fumiko, Sakura-sensei turns around. She has given up on chasing the cat away at any faster pace than walking, and seems just about ready to call animal control when she notices the chaos, and shuts it down with a scream that, Minako is certain, will show up on the seismometers. But the walls somehow remain standing.

"You seemed spooked by that cat," Hikaru whispers to Minako as Sakura-sensei hands off the delinquents to the security officer.

"Hey," Minako says, "it was a creepy cat. And seriously, did no one notice it get in?"

Hikaru admits she didn't.

"That cat must have seriously good stealth," Minako continues. "Maybe it's a magical cat or something."

Hikaru giggles. "It's a shapeshifting alien! It just took the shape of a cat to go unnoticed on Earth."

"And how would you know that, Hikaru?" Minako asks, looming over her friend.

"Why," Hikaru says, "you didn't suspect me of being an alien myself?"

Minako grins. "Oh, you think so? That's just what I've hypnotized you into believing. Actually, I'm the shapeshifting alien!"

That does it, and the two friends dissolve into giggles that cause a few annoyed stares.

Until, that is, Minako sees a yellow glint in white fur from the corner of her eye, and points it out to Hikaru.

"The janitors will get rid of it soon," Hikaru reassures her.

"If they can," Minako mumbles. Because at the moment, she's not entirely certain she would bet on the janitors on that confrontation.

Because regardless of quips, at the moment Aino Minako is quite comprehensively distracted from the matter of flight and gymnastics and classes and even her love for Higashi by a bizarre but salient question:

Why is she being stalked by a cat?

* * *

Professor Tomoe Souichi runs into the laboratory already well-aware that he won't be able to endure what he will find.

An attack, he knows. He does not know from whom.

His research has attracted plenty of attention, little of it good. Inhumane, some call it, for all that he only ever used volunteers. A small amount of missing paperwork - okay, several mountain ranges of missing paperwork, but who's counting? - proved enough to get him dismissed from the university and publicly disgraced. But between selling patents and his family wealth, he is wealthy enough to continue with more limited experimental work. True, the path to immortality is for now closed to him, but his present work stands on the verge of a breakthrough. First the establishment ignored the gravitational anomalies, then they dismissed them, and now, as they slowly recognize their importance, Tomoe has found himself five steps ahead, as usual. He isn't a genius for nothing, after all.

Professor Tomoe Souichi knows his work has attracted enemies. But until he runs into the receiving room of the laboratory, where Keiko and Hotaru were, he does not understand those enemies' caliber.

It is a scene of pure ruin. Keiko, who had stuck with him through every betrayal and humiliation, is gone - no one but family would even have recognized the charred pieces of her body. It is as if she was torn apart by a rabid beast. But then, perhaps that is precisely what happened. Professor Tomoe has no doubt that this was a deliberate attack, but it does not bear the marks of a paramilitary assault. The yakuza? But it is unlikely that his research would have even reached their ears, and besides, it does not look like the devastation was inflicted by anything human.

He is sure his safety measures were amply sufficient, but he cannot help but feel responsible for his wife's death, in that moment.

Then a faint whimper, and immediately that guilt is forgotten. Professor Tomoe hurries across the room and lifts a beam to the side to see where his daughter had hidden. But the pinch of hope is dashed as he sees Hotaru, or what remains of her.

With state-of-the-art medical equipment, she would be lucky to survive an hour.

He embraces her, and carrying her barely-moving body in his hands, he runs through the wreckage. The instruments can be rebuilt. Professor Tomoe Souichi is still plenty rich.

Only his heart is lost somewhere among the ashes, and so it is a very specific set of instruments he searches for.

They're not intact, not precisely. But he sets Hotaru down, muttering that Daddy was going to fix things, and then begins to twiddle with the wires. No crucial components destroyed. True, there's plenty of sparks as he sets the refrigeration unit running, and the centrifuge wobbles in its setting, but it's working.

From the outside, the device seems like some sort of Rube Goldberg machine accomplishing nothing in particular. Professor Tomoe knows what it truly does, and he shudders with the recognition that if he's wrong, he might be damning the Earth.

But he's doing it for his daughter, and so he wastes no time on self-recrimination.

He attaches the electrodes to his head, and waits.

"Professor Tomoe," comes the respectful yet imperial voice of the Pharaoh. "I am sorry for what happened."

"You - "

"I wasn't responsible," the Pharaoh assures him. "The youma of darkspace took badly to the thought you might reveal their astral realm's existence."

Professor Tomoe doesn't care about revenge. He has his flaws, but he will always choose to save lives rather than punish the being responsible for taking them. Some part of him is relieved that this moral prioritization remains intact even when it's his family it applies to.

He doesn't care about the youma of darkspace. He cares about Hotaru.

"Is there any way to save my daughter?" he asks.

The Pharaoh paused. "I have the means," he says. "Let me upload the knowledge into your mind."

The Pharaoh gives directions. Professor Tomoe Souichi follows them. More electrodes, more links. In principle, he knows, the Pharaoh could rewrite his entire mind with the depth of connection he is creating. But that is irrelevant before the fact that Hotaru is no longer breathing.

And then a flash, like lightning, as the Pharaoh imparts his wisdom, and he knows she will live. And even as his hands begin moving with the precision of a surgeon, connecting Hotaru herself to the machine, tears of partial relief spill from his eyes at last.

He is saving his daughter's life, and if there is a cost, he no longer cares about it.

* * *

Aino Minako walks home in a state of distilled frustration. That damned cat...

Well, being chewed out for eating in class, despite her attempt to hide it, hasn't improved her mood either. But then, all the anxiety had made her hungry, so that was the cat's fault too. And, she imagines as she kicks at a piece of gravel on the sidewalk, her grades would be better too if not for the cat. True, she hadn't met it yet at the time she took the relevant tests, but what does that matter?

The bad news is that her grades in Japanese class got bad enough to require a tutor. The good news is that the tutor will be Higashi.

The letter is still sitting in her backpack, of course, half-forgotten. Her glum mood, matching the chalkboard-gray skies above, proved enough to distract her into forgetting to give it. But whatever - she'll hand Higashi the letter tomorrow. That's not a problem.

The problem is the cat. Surely, Minako decides, the problem is the cat. After all, it surely cannot be her, and it most certainly isn't Higashi, and the teachers are ultimately just doing their jobs, if not always well. True, she doesn't appreciate the mountains of time that tradition dictates she spend on school, but none of that is new, and therefore not the point to be concerned about.

Well. She has a problem, and that means it's time to create a Plan.

It's not that Minako doesn't realize she's being silly. But it is one of her core tenets not to feign solemnity. It is many adults' goal to excise silliness from their lives; but what does that leave? Only that which is necessary, Minako thinks. And to do only what is necessary isn't life at all.

That decided, Minako begins to plot. She doesn't want the nameless cat dead, but she needs more than to have it leave on its own way. She needs revenge - not against the cat, but for her own peace of mind. Something small, preferably funny -

She pauses as she hears a pained meow.

Minako peers around the corner carefully. In the alley, there's nothing particularly scary, just a boy about as old as her who has backed, with clear malicious intent, a cat into a corner -

No, not a cat. _The_ cat.

For a moment, she hesitates. Even seeing the knife, or maybe even sword, that the boy is pointing at the animal, she isn't sure whether she should try to intervene. She has, after all, worked herself up over the past hours into a supervillain's spite for the cat.

But that doesn't mean she wants it tortured.

"Hey!" she yells before she realizes that she might regret it, just as she glimpses a monster she can't quite detail in the shadow on the wall. "What are you doing?!"

She gasps as the boy turns around, to reveal Higashi's shining face, and her panic evaporates.

"Minako?" he asks. (He knows her name! That, at least, is a relief from the worst of her fears.) He isn't holding a knife at all - she must have imagined that. "It's a feral cat. I'm trying to catch it, to have someone handle it - I saw it at school."

"Oh," Minako says, deflated. "I did, too. You're doing the right thing - "

Minako doesn't see the cat escape, but then, the cat hasn't maxed out its stealth for nothing. In the end, she walks home filled with more despair than ever, almost at the point of clawing the walls. She's made an idiot of herself, in front of Higashi at that, and all for what? A spark of compassion for the infernal feline?

Well, it certainly got away - Minako imagines that it's going to get hit by a car for her intervention. The clouds seem to be closing in on her, a uniform gray, and she kicks a couple more pebbles down the road to let out the general grime inside her.

But even so, some defiant part of her thinks, what she did might have been stupid, might have made a terrible impression on Higashi, but at least it wasn't spiteful. At least it wasn't the worst of her. And now she understands that revenge on the cat would have been the bad sort of ridiculous.

Nevertheless, she is in the main despondent; and she certainly does not think about what she saw in Higashi's shadow. And that is a true mistake, if one of little consequence.

Because the shadow was no illusion, and the blade Minako saw no hallucination.

* * *

"Report," Commander Danburite says as soon as the connection is established.

Narkissos appears before the screen looking - frazzled, really. "I have encountered a Mau," he says.

"Really?" Danburite asks, leaning forward. "An actual Mau this time, rather than a cat?"

"Yes, I - "

"That was a rhetorical question," Danburite says. "What indicated that they were a Mau?"

Narkissos gives his answers as Danburite toys with a pen. Strange behavior. Uncanny stealth. A bald spot that might have been Serenity's crescent.

"Agent Narkissos," Danburite eventually has to interrupt, "stop making a fool of yourself. The first false alarm was funny, this one is not. Stop hunting cats and focus on the mission."

"Commander Danburite, if this is true - "

"If that cat had actually been one of the Mau advisors of the Silver Millennium, you would be dead right now. If this were true, Narkissos, it would be above your paygrade. Stop seeing Mau everywhere. Is one of the girls you're gathering prayer from a Starguard, by any chance?"

Narkissos, thankfully, stays silent.

Danburite can't help but think back to the last time he saw a Mau. It should be clearer in his mind than it is, really. For him, after all, it was only a few years ago.

As far as Earth is concerned, millennia have passed.

Danburite is not used to that, at least not yet. Perhaps he will never be. The long sleep in darkspace, in the wake of Silence, caused a feeling of displacement and holes in his memory, but not one to compare with the changes outside.

The Silence reforged the world from what seems to have been its origin. No trace remains of the towers, the gardens, even the mountains. And with the Realms severed, humanity fell so very far that he barely even feels regret for what he does to the people of this trivial age.

Not like he did during the war. Not like the heartrending moment when he crossed blades with Starguard Venus herself. He loved her, even then - perhaps especially then. It was silly, at first. A boy's crush on one of the Silver Millennium's greatest and final guardians, a love that never had a chance of being reciprocated. His birth had been lower than common, and he knew -

Yet, driven by love, he joined the military, and driven by genius, he made himself into a legend. She even noticed him, before the end. But war came, and he was no Endymion, to betray his duty in love's name. And then came ruin, and transformation, and Silence, and stasis.

And so Danburite clicks his fingers to shake himself out of reminiscing, and walks away from the screen to play his part in the night tour of the Dark Agency headquarters.

The crowd of twenty is yawning already. They will all come up with individual explanations for that lethargy - rationalization when faced with the impossible is a universal trait, and not only a human one. Of course, the truth is that an ever-increasing portion of their brains is dedicated to unconscious prayer. A precise neural resonance, to create a comparable resonance in darkspace.

To crack open the seals around Metallia's prison, and fulfill the pact that gave them the power to survive.

"And now," Fluorite says, "a few words from our CEO, Dan Burr!"

Danburite walks onto the balcony with a grin. "Welcome!" he says. "I know the hour is late" - and there are some knowing smiles among the audience for that - "but then, that's how we like it. When you're starting in the music business, or for that matter in any crowded business, you have to find something that stands out."

He speaks for a bit of branding, and of what they do, and to congratulate the visitors on winning tickets to the monthly tour. They can't afford to collect energy from every single tour, of course. Not this far from plausible deniability. Danburite has friends, and Kunzite has more, but they're still strangers to this Earth.

By the time Danburite finishes speaking, the machines surrounding the theater have finished their work, and every last one of the visitors is asleep.

"Okay," he tells the youma as he walks onto the floor. "It's time to get the visitors to their hotel rooms. They'll be able to explain away a lot, but it's our job to minimize how much they have to."

One by one, he checks the prone bodies, helping to confirm their identities. Until, that is, he comes to the last one.

"He won't wake up," Danburite realizes.

Fluorite turns to him. "Are you sure?"

"Coma," Danburite says. "At best, he'll be a vegetable. We'll need to get as much prayer as we can, and then - Kelix, you'll imitate him for the next few days. Then we'll fake a murder."

Danburite looks down at the man - the boy, really. He is maybe sixteen, as these short-lived humans grow. Cropped reddish hair, vivid blue eyes. He was innocent by even the sternest standard, unknowing of the war that demanded his death.

This is the path that love and duty have led Danburite onto.

But he doesn't have the time for regrets.

* * *

As Minako dries herself off, her thoughts have finally stopped folding onto themselves with memories of the cat. It was an annoyance, but it's in the past, and surely it'll get caught soon, by Higashi or by someone else.

No, as she looks in the mirror, it's her reflection that frustrates her. The doubts return, nagging at her appearance, and the doubts from the other side say that she's just too young for Higashi to notice her, and on a third front Haneda's surprising closeness to Higashi, which may or may not mean she's actually his girlfriend but which isn't a good sign for her love, all of which is not to mention her mother's anger, about her grades and her demeanor and her hobbies alike -

Minako notices the cat out of the corner of her eye, and connects the dots instantly. She reaches for it, grabs it, and tosses it straight out the window before she is even consciously aware of what happened.

"Bad enough that it's stalking me," she says to herself, "now it's peeping on me as well?!"

But still, the flash of anger evaporates with the water, because Minako is done with all her homework for tomorrow (Friday being admittedly a different matter), and so she boots up the computer as soon as she's clothed again. Today is a day to mow down some zerg.

Or get devoured by them, admittedly. Minako is good for her age - extremely so, even - but the matchmaking algorithm doesn't, and shouldn't, handicap age. Still, some actual exercise for the brain, as opposed to the meaningless grind of schoolwork, would -

Which is when she notices the cat _again_. It's sitting safely on a shelf too high for Minako to easily reach, presumably having learned from previous experience.

"I apologize about getting off on the wrong foot," the cat quietly says with a bow. "But I needed a private place to speak with you. I'm Artemis."

"Aino Minako," Minako responds. Then she rubs her eyes. "Okay, I'm definitely hallucinating."

"You're not," Artemis says. "Aino Minako, you have a great destiny."

Minako thinks for a moment before closing her eyes. "Not listening to you, hallucination."

"Here," Artemis says, jumping down from his perch. Minako opens her eyes to see that he now has a compact in his paw, which he offers to her. "You are the reincarnation of Starguard Venus, and this mirror should help you access your power, which is needed as the youma of darkspace circle over the Earth."

Minako blinks. "Who are you, anyway, assuming for a moment you're real? Are you some kind of spirit?"

"No," Artemis answers. "I am Artemis of Mau." And suddenly Minako feels like she's being pulled into these lilac eyes again. "I was an imperial advisor to Serenity IV and the Admiral of the Spinward Fleet. I bear the Omnicompass, and under the current circumstances, I am the acting regent of the Silver Empire. I have been searching a year for you, so believe me when I say you're important in this. If you still believe me to be a hallucination, I can prove otherwise, though it will be painful. And otherwise, I need you to _listen_."

"Listening, Admiral," Minako says, suddenly paying very close attention. "So, you want my help to save the world or something?"

"Yes. I am sorry."

"Awesome!"

Aino Minako isn't sure why or how her life has turned into some sort of RPG, or perhaps anime, but she'll take it. She knows this is supposed to be a solemn moment, taking on great responsibility and all that. But adventure awaits, and if her optimism is childish, then she'll hold onto it anyway. Certainly, she has already forgiven Artemis for all the trouble he was responsible for today.

"Look into the compact," Artemis says. "The transformation phrase will come to you."

"Wait," Minako says. "Who are we fighting, exactly? Youma, you said?"

"You may call them that," Artemis explains. "They are creatures of darkspace who can nevertheless partially manifest in realspace. Some among them are the corrupted remnants of the Earth Kingdom's elite, others natives of darkspace who they allied with."

"And they want to take over the world?"

"At best," Artemis said. "I don't think there would be very much left of Earth, if they succeed in their conquest."

"Okay," Minako says. She pauses, recognizing the importance of this moment. This is the beginning of her story, of her legend. Hopefully it'll end in victory, but she needs something to mark it. "Then so be it. I swear, upon my heart, that I will protect the people of Earth from this threat." And then she looks into the compact, at her reflection, and she sees another reflection superimposed behind it -

"Venus Power, Make Up!"

And the blinding light that comes entirely eclipses her previous attempt to commemorate the occasion. Because _this_ is really the beginning of her story, and it could not have been otherwise.

Great volcanoes rising from a plain of black and yellow, strangely organic and perfectly round. Two hearts beating in unison. Intricate carvings in poisonous metal. A landscape - a rising, massive, brilliant sun above great cities of golden eggshells, drenching everything in a million interplays of light and shadow, rainbows littering the horizon. Vast caverns crawling with strange life, and elegant statues crossing their laser-blades. Metal beams tessellating in a dazzling ascent into a sky thick with possibility. A million whispered secrets, a billion shouted lies. A single cannon hovering above, inspiring more fear than a thousand battle-stations. And all of it upon rolling tesserae, a natural grid for civilizations to build upon.

She is mystery.

She is beauty.

"Who are you?" Artemis asks, in what she knows as a ritual question to test her understanding.

"I am Venus," she says.

Then she pauses.

"But," she continues, "it wouldn't do for our enemies to know that, would it?"

* * *

For every death, a rebirth. For every fall, a rise. For every descent into slumber, an awakening.

This is the bargain Chaos offers. It seems just. It seems balanced.

But balance isn't all it's talked up as.

Galaxia pursued - pursues - the right end, in the end. This does not excuse her means. True evil is to be destroyed, not to be bargained with.

Hypocritical of me to say that, I know.

For every rebirth, a death. For every rise, a fall. For every awakening, a descent into slumber.

Yet Chaos hasn't won.

For every ending, a beginning. Only this is a mere prelude. It isn't the beginning, not yet.

But it won't be long.


	2. 1,00 - The Bargain

_The world was young, the mountains green,  
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,  
No words were laid on stream or stone,  
When Durin woke and walked alone..._

_\- J.R.R. Tolkien, Song of Durin, The Lord of the Rings_

1.00 - The Bargain  
Friday, 4 July 2014

Sometimes, the rebirth of galaxies turns on grand decisions made by ancient superintelligences capable of understanding the implications of their choices to the thousandth degree, choices that can be suboptimal but are only evident as true mistakes when a comparable opponent is there to take antagonistic advantage.

Other times, destinies are written by the half-asleep hand of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, which coincidentally brushes a strand of hair into her eyes in just the correct fashion to cause discomfort, and put her into an ever-so-slightly more awake state of mind a moment before the ringing of the alarm.

The origin is this: that which mathematics makes possible, exists, but only some of that which mathematics makes possible is connected.

But the beginning is this: Tsukino Usagi, for once, gets up on time.

She does not get ready in a rush, for she does not have to. But she is used to a rush, and so her pace is quick. Clothes, hair, a dozen other necessities. A goodbye to her parents. The short walk to school, taken at a casual pace. This is not her normal morning routine; if she had been counting, which of course she hasn't been, she would calculate it to happen approximately twenty-four percent of schoolmornings, with the remaining seventy-six percent comprising of mad sprints to be either barely on time or only minimally late.

Meanwhile, a Mau named Luna wanders forlornly, trying to reach at the bandage covering the crescent wordmei on her forehead. Eventually, a retired doctor will take pity on her and take the bandage off, a mere hour after the beginning of the school day. Luna will not think twice about the incident - it is not the first time she has been bullied, in various ways, and not the first time she has been tempted to break her cover.

She knows better than that, of course. She has been fighting a shadow war for three years, after all.

But she is back in Tokyo, back in Minato Ward, because she is increasingly certain that something has been missed. The Starguard were supposed to be reincarnated in close proximity of some sort. The only one they have found, Sailor V, was born in London, but her parents moved back to Tokyo when she was nine years old.

Artemis remains convinced that the other Senshi will be found in London, or at least in its geographical vicinity. Luna no longer is.

(Not that their life leaves much time to devote to the search, anyhow. The Dark Kingdom is too unrelenting, too omnipresent. Three people, two of them with a catlike true form, is not enough to stop them, even if the third is an inexperienced Starguard. But Artemis of Mau and Starguard Venus are quite sufficient to stall them, and so Luna has the opportunity to search for a way to make herself useful.)

Altogether, neither Usagi nor Luna recognize just how close they came to an encounter, that morning.

Sometimes, fates are determined by transcendent choice. Other times, by somnolent luck.

But where luck will return, choice will not. 

* * *

Lunchtime. Juuban Municipal Junior High School is afloat on tides of gossip and waves of love, anchored only by the knowledge that classes are coming, and soon.

And also, in Osaka Naru's case, by certain other oddities.

"Naru!" Osaka Naru turns to see Tsukino Usagi, her best friend and classmate. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong - "

"You didn't immediately run away once Umino sat down."

Naru blinks, noticing the otaku's thick glasses only two seats over. He isn't actually a creep, but he is certainly unusually annoying. "Mom's been acting weird," she admits. "She's doing a big sale at the store, even though she never does sales, and she's been really harsh on Naruru..." She shakes her head. "I don't know what's going on."

"Have you asked her?"

"...No," Naru admits. "I should just do that, shouldn't I?"

"Who knows - your mom was reasonable with me when I came over, but parents are always nicer to other people's children."

Naru shrugs. She isn't sure how forthcoming her mother will be if it's some financial issue, but at least she'll know something, which is better than knowing nothing.

They sit for a bit in relative quiet, in the noonday swirl of wisdom and whimsy, before Umino's megaphone voice drowns it out.

"And Sailor V's busted this really weird robbery in Edinburgh," he says. Naru does want to flee at this point, but it's too late for that, so she focuses on her lunch. "She's got superpowers for sure."

"She's just an idol," Kenji objects. "And not a very good one." The latter part of that statement launches some furious protests, which are buried under Umino's continued explanation.

"No, that's obviously just a cover," Umino says. "I mean, she's at the very least a secret agent - look at how many suspicious events she's involved in. Even I can see that, so the governments are going to know it for sure. And she's performed at enough benefit concerts for all sorts of causes, a lot of them political."

"Well, so she's involved in politics," Kenji protests. "So what?"

"So why would the geopolitical players care about a girl our age?" Umino asks with a sweep of his hands. "And why on Earth would she be moonlighting as a vigilante? I support the secret experiment theory, personally. Superpowers don't actually happen on accident. And if she was an alien infiltrator she'd have been stopped long ago, because she's not actually being inconspicuous."

"What if she's an alien infiltrator pretending to be a secret experiment?" someone that Naru doesn't see asks.

"Excellent question!" Umino says, by now standing on his chair and lecturing as if to a classroom. The students around him are hushed, listening in fascination - for some mocking, for others genuine. "And, I mean, she could be a lot of things. But Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation is probably correct. Sailor V has political connections and superpowers - they're probably linked. Of course, it may be a corporate thing - I'm pretty sure she was responsible for the Dark Agency's bankruptcy."

At this point Eisuke, sitting to the other side of Umino and resolutely eating despite the discussion, pulls on Umino's hand as a hint for him to sit down. Umino ignores the hint.

"This is ridiculous," Kisho says from the adjacent table. "Umino, I thought you were smarter than the conspiracy theorists."

"Oh, you should see what the conspiracy theorists are saying," Umino fires back with a smile. "Reality will never be as weird as the stuff they think up. But this is one-in-a-million stuff, still. Think about it - has any other idol craze been anything like Sailor V? Any music group, for that matter? They sometimes sing about saving the world, but they don't usually go and fist-fight criminals, and if they do they don't usually win. Not that I think Sailor V is fist-fighting them, mind you. I have no idea what sort of powers she has - they're not that bad at cover-ups."

Naru is staring at the unfolding scene in awe. She was surprised enough by the way her mother has been acting, but Umino's sudden confidence is even more stunning of a shift. Has everyone been replaced by doppelgangers while she hasn't been looking?

"Gurio Umino," growls Naganori Goto-sensei as he passes through, "sit down."

Umino does, seeming to collapse into his usual smaller self. Naru wonders about whether he's actually right. It does sound quite incredible, but given how her preconceptions have done today, she is less sure than usual about her intuition.

She'll talk to her mother, she decides. If she can help in any way, for her family and for Naruru especially, she will. After all, what's the worst that could happen? 

* * *

Chiba Mamoru isn't having a great day even before he gets hit in the head by a crumpled-up piece of paper.

"That hurt, you know?" he mutters. The girl who threw the paper ball at him doesn't seem to even have noticed. "Are you listening, Miss Bump-Head? You trying to put bumps on my head too?"

He has better things to do than start arguments with middle-school girls, in principle. But at the moment the girl in question is a convenient target that won't care too much about his bad mood.

"H-hey! They're not bumps, they're buns!"

Mamoru unfolds the paper she threw at him. "Thirty percent? Did you not study at all?"

"Mind your own business!"

The problem is, Mamoru really doesn't want to.

The problem is, Mamoru's business is something that's eclipsed his (excellent) academics and (fruitful) involvement in Robotics Club.

Namely, the problem of his recurrent amnesia.

Chiba Mamoru has never remembered much before age six, when the car crash killed his parents. In a sense, his sense of identity has been loose since then. He had to take so much on trust during his recovery, even his name. And he has always doubted, somewhere within himself, whether he could have become someone else.

Now, he actually seems to be becoming someone else.

Digging up memories of his nights hurts, like digging into an open wound. That alone tells Mamoru that something worse than sleep is going on. He should go see a doctor, really, but he's too worried about what could be found.

Because the few memories he can dredge up have him fighting - creatures, sometimes, other times ordinary people, and one memory of what he suspects is a jewelry store robbery.

Chiba Mamoru suspects he has quite literally gained an alternative personality that is a criminal, and he fears that possibility becoming fact. Better to go on with the pretense of a normal life for as long as is possible.

_Even if people get hurt because of it?_ he asks himself.

He has no answer.

Mamoru looks up as he realizes that he has finally confronted his fears. That, at least, is a fear of fear that has been defeated. No, he decides, he _will_ see a doctor, eventually. Preferably in as confidential a manner as possible. But for now, he needs to be Chiba Mamoru for a time, to remind himself of what that's like.

Which means going home, and getting further ahead on homework - he didn't get into Moto Azabu on his looks, after all. Mamoru lingers for just long enough to get food, and then he walks home, content for once. There are a million worlds of potential trouble around the corner, but he has his own little world to optimize too.

His head whips around upon seeing the Osa-P Jewellers', though. It's a store he has never visited, but the sheer volume of the commotion, the sheer number of middle-aged women trampling each other in an attempt to get at the merchandise...

It must be quite some sale. 

* * *

Osaka Naru comes to the store shortly after its close for the day. The shelves aren't exactly empty, but there's noticeably less jewelry in stock.

"Mom?"

She doesn't receive a response. After a few moments, she knocks on the door to the back room, where she can hear some rustling. Then again, more insistently.

The door opens, and her mother looks out. She's been digging around in the drawers, it seems.

"Mom? What's happening?"

A split-second decision seems to pass over her mother's face, and then she lunges forward and that face changes.

Naru has time to scream a panicked cry for help before the monster that was her mother grapples her. But then she's wrestling for her life, and Naru has never been very good at wrestling. The monster chokes her and throws her onto the floor.

"I'm not your mother," it says, confirming something already quite obvious.

Naru crawls onto her elbows, looking up at the approaching monster. Her heart is thunderous in her ears. She knows that, if she does nothing, she will die. She knows that she cannot fight this thing physically, and nothing she has learned in school has prepared her for this. She wishes for someone to save her, but no one is coming.

"Stop!" she yells. "Can we bargain?"

The monster seems to stop. "And what do you have that the Dark Kingdom would want?"

Naru swallows. "Information? Or - if you need me to do something specific..."

The monster pauses, seeming to scratch its chin, or whatever passes for a chin in its inhuman physiology. "Well. You could be of use to our plans..."

Naru swallows, realizing just how scary of a secret conspiracy she has apparently just come into contact with.

"Then," the monster continues, "so be it. I am Morga, and you may yet be of use as an agent of the Dark Kingdom. I will take you into darkspace, where my superiors will judge your potential utility to the cause. Clear?"

"Wait," Naru says. "My mother and Naruru. Are they safe?"

"So long as you cooperate," Morga says, "they will be."

Naru forces herself to take that as good enough.

She wonders whether she should be more afraid, as Morga prepares some sort of machine. Her mother has been replaced by some sort of monster, and that monster is now preparing to take her into something that sounds like some alternate world - another planet? Naru is unsure whether she should be calling them demons or some such, but the term seems to be approximately reasonable right now. And she feels, distinctly, like she is nothing before this vastness, like she has caught a glimpse of the horror beneath the surface of the universe, but only the first glimpse of millions to come.

But she is not afraid. Not really. Her determination to protect her family, as best as she can, feels her with a sort of calm despite the circumstances.

She has had enough of terror. Right now, she is doing something, no matter how ill-advised it may be.

Morga points Naru towards the machine, and the girl climbs in, feels herself sink into it. For a moment.

And then, as Morga presses a button -

It is not her eyes that see pure darkness around her, and it is not her ears that hear the hungry howl of the crashing waves. And it is not Osaka Naru's hair, either, that the wind blows in her face. Her proportions are correct, and she suspects that an image of her current form would be good enough for an ID, but her motions feel strange, as if her muscles are not quite there and also as if she is moving through - not something as dense as water, but certainly more than mere air.

For a moment, she looks at her left hand, trying to make out something through the black. The sensation is as if it's painlessly melting, but when a light comes on she's relieved to see it intact and unchanged.

"Come on," Morga says, holding a rectangular lantern carved with marine designs - or is it an organic lantern pushed into a rectangular box? "Hold my hand."

Her hand is clawed, and in the lantern's dim light looks even less human than before. Naru takes it regardless.

Then Morga holds the lantern aloft, raising it high above her head, and something inside it moves. Around them something spins, and Naru is pulled up, the wind rushing past her in a huge gale, tearing her skirt and almost making her drop Morga's claw. She holds on for dear life, because she doubts Morga will care enough to make her. It is as if they are in the wall of a typhoon, and the storm's fury surrounds them, and buffets them, and transforms them, and Naru wonders if her insides are writhing with some mutating power, if she'll wind up looking like Morga at the end of it, or if it's merely the acceleration. There is no physical discomfort, though. The air is not too cold, nor hot, although Naru finds it different to quantify its temperature.

Above them, clouds swoop by in the sky, and between them fragments of something clear. But -

"Where are the stars?" Naru asks.

Morga laughs. It is a cruel laugh, one that feels more heartless even than her behavior when she had stolen her mother's face and nearly killed Naru.

"This is darkspace, child," she says. "There are no stars here."

So they fly, an unheard sonic boom trailing behind them, across a bleak sky and above a black sea with no islands that can be discerned, Osaka Naru clasping tightly the monster's hand in a hope for survival as dim as the disturbing lantern Morga holds.

And in another realm entirely, a young man in a tuxedo and a carnival mask stares curiously at the storefront of Osa-P Jewellers, before shaking his head and turning around.

"The Legendary Silver Crystal is not here," he mutters to himself. "Even if it had been, it would've been lost in the clearance sale. No, I'm going about this in the wrong way. If you can't play the game, play your opponent, and I _know_ my opponent."

The man - in truth, not quite a human in the sense the term is generally understood at all, but that is a matter for later - swings his cape around himself, and then he is gone into the Tokyo night. 

* * *

Nephrite, Atlantic General of the Earth Kingdom, smiles as he enters the audience hall.

Jadeite is eyeing him suspiciously. As expected from Jadeite, really. The Pacific General is far too prone to broadcasting his weakness. Really, even when Nephrite considers that he was a last-minute replacement for Axinite, chosen by Beryl's favouritism - even then Jadeite is a disappointment. There are only three Shitennou, really, right now.

(Mind you, Nephrite is not blind to the possibility that Kunzite and Zoicite believe there are only two.)

"So, Jadeite," Nephrite says, "shall we speak in your office? I'd guess it has the most privacy in your castle." As if he doesn't know that Jadeite has two more hidden rooms, at least. To Kunzite or Zoicite he would have said this with a kinder smile, but right now he has to deal with Jadeite.

"Very well," Jadeite says, leading him through the maze of hallways. "I assume you want to discuss some form of cooperation?"

"We're all cooperating," Nephrite points out. Which, technically, they are.

The Earth Kingdom, or the Dark Kingdom as those born in darkspace (and many who were not) tend to call it, has been amassing power and influence for the past three years. Beryl ordered them to capture Earth intact, and for that reason they have maintained strict secrecy in their operations - a challenge, but a welcome one. There is so little in the way of diversions, on this version of Earth. Some minor troubles, to be sure, which can be tricky given the constraints on using force - governments that refuse to bend, scientists with insight into their actions, vigilantes led by Sailor V, an infuriating opponent that some more superstitious youma call a Starguard.

Nephrite knows better. Sailor V is not Moon, nor Venus; the Starguard are dead. Even they only barely survived Silence, and they were in darkspace. And a new Starguard attuning to a Star Seed is... not completely impossible, but certainly this civilization is incapable of anything close.

No, the Silver Empire is gone. And, of course, the youma, aware of this, plot against each other due to having nought to fear. Nephrite is none too fond of that.

They enter Jadeite's office, Nephrite having to tuck his forearm in to prevent it growing an extra elbow. The transition of realspace life to darkspace is imperfect, though it is stable: given time, the extra elbow would have dissolved away.

"So," Jadeite says as the office door closes. "What is it, Nephrite? You wouldn't have come here without a very strong reason."

"It's not as if I hate you, Jadeite," Nephrite says with a sigh, when a message comes in from - from Commander Morga, it seems. Jadeite moves to silence it.

"No, no," Nephrite says, "take the call. I'm plenty interested in what the Commander found."

Jadeite grits his teeth, but given the facade of cooperation he is forced through convention to accept.

"General Jadeite - General Nephrite! I, ah, I've secured a potential asset for our Tokyo operations. However, her strategic value is uncertain."

"Bring her in," Nephrite says. He turns to Jadeite. "Unless you have other plans?"

Jadeite grits his teeth again at the inability to contradict Nephrite. Really, he's much too easy to toy with. "Bring her in," he accepts. "And let us hope this doesn't waste too much time." 

* * *

Osaka Naru can't help but be impressed by her surroundings, not that she's trying not to be.

It's a castle - there's nothing else to call it. It towers on a rough crag, over a different shore, and towers into the sky in a matter that is difficult to appreciate the scale of. It's as high as Tokyo Tower, at least. Its walls are green and white, rising in pillars that evoke sea-cliffs and sea foam, as well as solitude and defiance as a whole.

As architecture it is magnificent, to Naru's untrained eyes. It is, however, rather disturbing on the smaller scale. It seems to be crawling, the rock intermingled with something disturbingly alive - mold, perhaps, but clearly placed intentionally.

The interior melds the wondrous and the disturbing with equal acuity. Vast halls, many but not all empty, echo with their footsteps - well, clawsteps in Morga's case, but that's the least troubling aspect here. Because at the same time she faces the hexagonal window-grids filled with a slime that certainly isn't honey, the chips of coral-like material that seem to have grown into the floor, the sheer panic that Naru's sense of direction has descended into, the eyes glaring down from the chandeliers...

It's not so much scary as repulsive, if she looks up close. The dancing sculptures are beautiful, but their surface is tiled with a knotwork design that seems to writhe like confused squid. The only things that are reassuringly solid are the set gems in those sculptures, and the rock floor under their feet. Even so, the rock glistens with a strange sheen, and Naru does not recognize the gems, which is a dire alert in itself.

She is a prisoner, though, and so she does not try to slow Morga down, in the faint hope of building up something resembling goodwill.

Eventually, they come to a door of pure jade, or at least an excellent facsimile, which swings open before them.

Morga gives a deep bow, taking Naru with her. "General Jadeite. General Nephrite."

The Generals look human, at least, or something like it - a touch too big-eyed, with a figure that is just slightly off, but Naru wouldn't be shocked at seeing people like them on the street, not like she would Morga. Jadeite has short blond hair, blue eyes, and is wearing a black military uniform that Naru wonders if she should recognize. Nephrite has flowing, reddish-black hair, gray eyes, and an equally sharp uniform of white and gold, and seems rather amused at the whole situation. What surrounds them is recognizable as an office, plated in rock and metal, with bookcases lining the walls and swords resting on the shelves. It is a room of martial purpose, of that there is no doubt.

"So who have you brought to - us?" Jadeite asks.

Morga looks at Naru to answer. "My... name is Osaka Naru," Naru says. "I'm in my second year of middle school at Juuban Municipal Junior High. I..."

"She stumbled onto one of our operations," Morga says, and then adds something more in a language Naru doesn't (yet) understand.

"A schoolgirl?!" Jadeite raises his brows. "I thought you competent enough to keep children away from your operations at least, Commander Morga."

Morga seems about to retort, but sighs and nods. "It was my error, General Jadeite."

"The girl is useless to us," Jadeite says, "but now she knows too much for us to let her go." Naru's heart freezes. Are they going to kill her? Just like that? "But," Jadeite continues, "covering up her death will be difficult. Perhaps you can handle that, Morga."

Morga steps back in disbelief, and in the process she loosens her grip. Naru's heart isn't hammering - at the moment she isn't even sure she has a heart - but she uses the opportunity to slip out of Morga's claws. Forward of back? A split-second decision, but she has no way to get home, and so she dashes forth, grabbing a sword from one of the shelves, and holds it to Nephrite's neck.

"Don't move!" she yells.

Nephrite lets out a laugh.

"Do I even need to say anything?" he asks. "But you're wrong, Jadeite. She has something to offer us indeed." Suddenly Naru sees the blade in her hand fall apart, and Nephrite lets out a breath that blows the dust away. The dark-haired general grips her hand. "Our deal is still on, Naru," he says. "You, at least, shouldn't go anywhere."

"What possible use do you have for her?" Jadeite asks, incredulous.

"Potential, my friend," Nephrite says, looking over Naru with a smirk. "You know of humanity's degeneration. The older generations are, en masse, useless to us except as instruments of conquest. But Naru and her like? They can still become a people worth ruling over."

"You really believe that? Look at her!"

"It's not a matter of the body," Nephrite says. "It's her mind."

Naru stays silent, not knowing what to think. The conspiracy is even worse than she had imagined, but if she can't fight it -

"Who are you people?" she asks, with genuinely no idea of what answer will come.

"That," Nephrite says, "is a long story. But briefly, we are the last survivors of the ancient Earth Kingdom, who have endured through the millennia in stasis within darkspace. Now, we return to fix the mistakes that humanity has made in our absence, and to return to our rightful place in realspace. Earth was a young garden, filled with melodies you could not even comprehend... before the betrayal. Before the war. Before Silence. But now the Silence ends, and we will bring back the light of ancient days." And in that moment, Nephrite, the ancient general of the Earth Kingdom, fixes Osaka Naru in his distant eyes, and she feels that he is looking at her, unlike Jadeite or Morga or even her mother, as someone who can one day be his genuine equal. "And you, with your family, can help us do so."


	3. 1,01 - Sailor Mars

1.01 - Sailor Mars  
Saturday, 5 July 2014

Jadeite seethes.

He understands now what Nephrite did. Using the girl as an excuse, he has entrenched himself on Jadeite's territory, in the Pacific drainage basin. As if the Atlantic wasn't enough - even with the north being given over to Zoicite, Nephrite's theater is the biggest of any of the Shitennou.

And as Jadeite seethes, Nephrite gets to work. He will devote the Osaka Naru case a share of his personal attention. Call it an affectation, call it boredom, call it sympathy - Nephrite did not lie to Jadeite, after all. The foothold in Japan is convenient, but he truly does believe the children are the means by which something worthwhile can be built of this disaster of a human society.

(Jadeite, for his part, barely even sees it as even the same species. What is a human cut off from the Realms? Only an echo, really. A shadow of the species that had once been, of the civilization Jadeite fought for with more zeal than any of his fellow Shitennou.)

And so Nephrite sits down with Naru, on the floor of a darkspace cavern, and tells her to interrogate him about Earth-that-was. "That is what I care about, in truth," he says. "The rebirth of our civilization."

"What destroyed it?" Naru asks, as her first question.

Nephrite finds that a wise place to begin. Technical details are important, and he will have to find a youma to impart them, but not repeating the mistakes of the past is more important still.

"War," he says. "Against the Silver Empire of the Moon. The Moon wished to annex Earth into its system-spanning empire. We fought to defend our independence, but the struggle was nearly hopeless. In the end, we found help from the denizens of darkspace."

"The youma."

"A pejorative term," Nephrite notes, "but one they perversely enjoy. Though in a certain sense, we are all youma now... With their aid, we attacked the Moon, but upon realizing that she had lost the war, Queen Serenity unleashed a terrible weapon to destroy us. The Silence cut realspace off from the Realms; it very nearly made the solar system uninhabitable. Only Earth survived, and even there the destruction was near-total."

"But you survived."

"We fled to darkspace," Nephrite says, his eyes burning with the glint of lost dreams. "Diminished. Desolate. Detached from our homeworld, and forced to spend an eternity in stasis because of the physics involved. But we survived, and now as Silence ends, we return."

Nephrite does not mention the more controversial aspects of their history, the ones he is himself not entirely proud of. The matter of the love between Princess Serenity and King Endymion that had started the war, for instance. Or the destruction that both sides had caused during the war even before Silence.

Revolutions are so rarely bloodless, a trend that the people of this time have rediscovered for themselves.

"But," Nephrite notices, "you'll be needed in Azabu-Juuban. Needless to say, you must not say a word about this to anyone." The threat is implicit, but amply sufficient.

Osa-P Jewellers' is being redecorated. Naru's mother will return to her position behind the counter, but for now she is in a rather more haggard state. She does not seem to appreciate that her daughter has saved her life, with this bargain. Or perhaps Agent Alzar has gone overboard in ensuring she would tell no one about these events. Youma lurk in the back - this is a forward base of operations, and Nephrite has no intent of leaving it undefended.

There will be prayer-gathering operations run from these rooms. More traditional infiltrations as well - Jadeite may not be in a cooperative mood, but Nephrite has no intent of giving up on the possibilities Japan holds. That the store has lost much of its inventory is almost a positive - an opportunity in devastation, as it goes.

And -

And, actually, making contacts in the jewelry community opens a possibility. Osa-P did not have the Legendary Silver Crystal, of course, no single store has a non-negligible probability of that, and its existence is apparently not public; but even cut off from the Astral Realms, the Crystal would be an indestructible and enormous gemstone of the sort that surely could not go completely unremarked.

And with it, Nephrite intends, the Earth Kingdom will regain the power of the Starguard. Because -

Because for all that the youma think they face only internal threats, Nephrite knows they are wrong.

It is true (in Nephrite's and other darkspace denizens' opinions, and only there) that the Solar System, and quite possibly the entire Milky Way Galaxy, holds nothing that can threaten the reborn Earth Kingdom. But the universe is vast.

And somewhere out there, Nephrite has no doubt at all that worse foes await.

* * *

Hino Rei has not always seen things in the flames.

Even when she began to see them, two years ago, it took her time to become capable of interpreting them properly. It was never as simple as seeing what happened; what she saw was possibilities, expressed in an abstract manner, and often unrelated to her own troubles. But what the gods chose to show her was their business; what she knew was that much of it was increasingly grim. Demons, or something like them, were seemingly coming onto the Earth, were slowly tainting it...

Rei talks of her visions rarely, and almost never with anyone save her grandfather. They are difficult enough to understand without other people's misplaced certitude as to their meaning. And a demonic invasion, while certainly very troubling, is also something few people would take seriously. Rei does not blame them for that - well, okay, she does. But she's used to dealing with people who do not understand the spiritual world but believe themselves to.

She is the daughter of Hino Takashi, after all.

But on this day, what she sees is rather more encoded than usual. It seems to represent, after ten minutes of reflection, a grid of girls about her age, most of them Japanese. Some of them she recognizes from school. Someone is hunting through them, perhaps hunting for someone in particular.

A shiver of fear runs through her, but as usual, she does not know what she can do. Are people disappearing? Is someone being hunted?

Is _she_ being hunted? The thought runs through her mind, but is immediately classified as overestimating her importance. She is only an observer, and she knows some people are fighting the demons - Sailor V, in particular, is likely to be one, and there is also the government, which surely knows. And other priests, for that matter. Rei has heard stories, through her grandfather and through his rival Shimada Ritsuo, of those who have fought demons, though such stories are never particularly reliable.

More likely -

More likely, Rei realizes in a flash of insight, is that Sailor V is the one being hunted. That thought, Rei holds on to. She should warn the superhero, who is certainly touched by some form of divinity, in some way, she thinks.

But she doesn't do it, not yet. There are chores to finish first, and Phobos and Deimos, her corvid companions, are hungry, and her grandfather is making lewd comments again that she needs to divert him from before serious trouble arises, and her visions are not urgent, not usually. So Hino Rei moves on with her daily routine, and keeps in the back of her mind the memory of an impression.

Because good and evil are at war with one another, and despite her hopes, Rei does not hold any doubts as to the fact that this conflict will one day spill out into the mortal realm.

In essence, she is completely and utterly correct.

* * *

Luna senses that something is strange in Hikawa Shrine from a distance.

The first thing she remembers is that this resonance was not there before. But then, after considering how long it has been since she was last in this part of Minato Ward, she is not especially surprised at that. So she walks at a casual pace, and enters the shrine grounds in her true form.

There is doubtlessly something in the air. Perhaps an overlay from another realm, though it does not feel like an intentional construction. Still, her perception is not perfect. Not enough. She can carry a great deal within herself, but she is too far from a true base of operations -

And then, recognition. Could this be a base of operations for the youma? It doesn't seem to be interfacing directly with darkspace, but then the Dark Kingdom could easily route their connection through other realms, if they wished to hide from - not her, necessarily, but someone only aware of darkspace. Luna knows some human scientists are approaching the truth.

And so she walks onwards, towards the point of maximum overlay, and is quite nonplussed to see an ofuda land on her forehead.

"You're not an ordinary cat," says the miko.

Luna squints, trying to decide whether her intuition can be trusted, before subtly motioning to the miko to follow her and walking into the shrine proper. As she does so, she covertly scans the girl for deviations from the human norm, and especially for any disturbances of the sort she's searching for.

Because, despite the earlier caution, Luna is increasingly certain she's found a second Starguard.

She doesn't have the certitude that Artemis would have, in her place. Artemis has always been the best of them, almost as far back as Luna can remember - during her childhood, admittedly, he was merely the prodigy, but he fulfilled that promise in full. He was the icon of the Mau population, and despite the accusations of paranoia, he was also the only one who truly foresaw the possibility of disaster.

If only Serenity IV had listened to him before it was too late, everything might have been different.

Twenty Mau had been stored in a quasispace formed specifically for the purpose, to escape even Silence, should it become necessary. Twenty had entered stasis; two of them lived to exit it. Artemis, the chancellor in all but name, and her, a bureaucrat turned logistics officer of moderate birth and little to truly mark her as exceptional.

They are the last two survivors of the Silver Millennium, not counting the monsters they fight against. For all Luna knows, they are the last two Mau in the universe, though the nature of time makes that difficult to quantify. The planet of their ancestors is so very far away.

So Luna does not know if the miko is the reincarnation of Starguard Mars, despite the matches being suspiciously good. There are crows perched on her shoulders, too, which causes her to wonder. They could not have been reincarnated too, surely. But the affinity is yet another similarity between this uncanny girl and the budding tactician Luna remembers - the Coronids were always fond of the fourth planet, and played their role in... something related to Starguard Mars.

(Her memory gaps are highly unwelcome, it must be said.)

"So," the miko asks respectfully once inside before the fire, and once Luna has set up the privacy protections, "what are you?"

"My name is Luna."

That causes a moment's startled jerk, which causes Luna some satisfaction. But the girl smooths her skirt and, past a bow, makes no further comment on the implausibility of an apparent cat speaking. "I am Rei Hino, and I am honored to make your acquaintance. What brings you to the Hikawa Shrine, noble spirit?"

"I'm not a spirit," Luna says, "though I suppose you may classify me as you wish. I am a relic of ancient times, of a civilization that preceded your own. Now the monsters that destroyed it have returned." The words do not come out of her moon-mark in the way she wants them to, but she feels she has gotten the point across well enough anyhow.

"I have seen it," Rei says, "in the fire. A war in the shadows, demons coming from their realm to invade the world."

Luna blinks, not sure what Rei means at first. Does she have some clairvoyant modifications? The humans do not have the technology in this time, not with the Silence. Or - no, the more likely explanation is that she has already began to synchronize with her Star Seed. That is good - a shorter learning period, perhaps - though it does not quite explain how.

She is confident now, regardless. Hino Rei is an ally, and the second Starguard they have found in this epoch.

Sitting back, she begins her explanation.

* * *

Rei wonders if she deserves this.

She probably does, she thinks. She allowed herself to become too proud, too confident in her secret knowledge, and that arrogance has evoked its natural and proper consequence. Reality is far more complex than she had believed.

An empire that reigned upon the Moon. A doomed attack from the Earth Kingdom. A deal with demons to prolong the war, which unleashed hell on all the worlds of the Solar System, even Earth itself. And in the end, after a doom Luna reveals little about, the threat of the youma had only been contained at terrible cost.

"The Earth was cast far from its current location in space," Luna said. "And for a time, the demons were shut out - as was a great deal of technology, which brought about collapse... but that was long ago. Now, the borders between realms have begun to fray."

"So what can I do?" Rei asked.

"You are the reincarnation of Starguard Mars," Luna said. "One of the most powerful defenders of the Silver Empire. You have the power to protect the Earth and its people from the youma, and perhaps to restore something of the past's glory."

From where the cat-spirit produces the pen-like artifact, Rei does not know. Something like that, so blatant an act of transfiguration, still disturbs her. She is used to a subtler sort of spirituality than, well, magic.

"I could tell you what it'll be like," Luna says. "But it's best if you discover for yourself."

Rei nods, but before anything else, decides to consider logically the possibility of Luna being evil. True, the exorcism did nothing to her, but a powerful enough dark spirit could ignore that. Yet - well, Sailor V is often seen with a cat at her side, which is already a strong sign.

"Is Sailor V a Starguard?" she asks. "Starguard Venus, for instance?"

Luna grins in a most unfeline fashion. "Yes," she says. "Though not, as it happens, Venus; that was a deliberate deception. The first one we found, and the only one for a long time."

"And now there's me," Rei says.

She inspects the pen. It is a detailed construct of what looks like black steel, with red and gold linings, and the closer she looks at it the more detail she sees.

And the longer she looks at it, the more the urge to say the phrase becomes overwhelming, until eventually Rei decides to stop delaying the moment of discovery.

"Mars Power, Make Up!"

And the world is magenta fire.

Corroded ziggurats creeping outward as stepped stars. Vast crimson craters lined with sacred flames. In the sky, a hovercraft zipping towards the blue sunrise. To every side, angles rebound on obtuse angles, and flocks of crows mark the sky-roads above the city-canyons. Slopes from dark green wilderness into lifeless ice, and then higher still, to the very brink of the void. Angry slogans written in rust. The mania of creation under triumphant fireworks. Parapets of remembrance, acidic etchings of melancholy nights. Daring duels on glowing skis. And below it all, pipes of steam and electricity and stranger fluids, driven by the idealism of youth, by the defiance of dusk, by the insight of the moment, never more than tentatively bound, never less than utterly committed.

She is passion.

She is flame.

"Who are you?" Luna asks after a moment's hesitation.

"I am Mars," she says before realizing that she speaks the truth. She is still aware that, a minute ago, she was Hino Rei, the only daughter of Hino Takashi and Hino Risa, a miko at the Hikawa Shrine, a student at T-A Academy, et cetera - but she does not feel like the same person right now. She is more excited than, perhaps, she has ever been in her life, and while she can justify that much with the chance to finally do something about a creeping doom she has foreseen for years, the general sense of a link to something bigger than herself remains. It is as if her mind is superimposed onto something else, something vast.

And it is prodding her to action.

"What now?" Starguard Mars asks, barely taking a moment to catch her own reflection. She is wearing a fuku, though shorter than most school uniforms, lined with red, but that is not the biggest change. Because her face is subtly different, and more than that, subtly inhuman - the ears just a little too sharp, the eyes just a little too large, off by just enough to be unidentifiable as Hino Rei and just barely identifiable as human. She suspects, already, some image of what she has gotten herself into. But it is too late to turn back, and she doesn't especially want to.

"Now," Luna says, "we begin. With something small, preferably. You said the flames unlocked your clairvoyance?"

Mars looks into the sacred fire, and for the first time, instead of the broken fragments of reality and possibility commingled, she sees the city in full - all Tokyo, and beyond. Jubilant children playing in parks, infuriated gangsters plotting vengeances, maniacal authors planning grand epics.

And in far too many points, darkness reaching its fingers into the fabric of normal space.

Starguard Mars knows, already, that she must not, and will not, allow it to get more than that. But the stream of fire rushing into her mind is too intense for her to hold on to, and as she almost feels her mind burning up, her heart seizes upon the moment, and one breath later she is Hino Rei again.

But along with the tendrils of darkness, she notes, there was something else she saw.

"Luna," she says. "Just how many realms are there?"

"An infinite number, technically, but they diminish," Luna says. "Presently relevant ones, a few dozen, I think. They're part of what drives your power as a Starguard. Why?"

"Because there's a knot of them ten blocks over," Rei says. "More of a... connection... than I saw anywhere else in Tokyo. And it's moving."

* * *

Mizuno Ami happens across the paradox by accident.

It being a Saturday, she is home, and with her mother needed at the hospital she is by herself. That's hardly foreign to her; she spends time on a bit of online chess, as well as on homework, but when all is said and done she has plenty of spare time to spend on diving into several books on astronomy that have been awaiting this day. It's not easy to push through, in places - these are books written for college students with a knack for the subject, not middle-schoolers - but Mizuno Ami is nothing if not persistent, at least in the academic sense. Some phenomena are more mysterious than others, and some explanations worse; and so the question of dark matter takes her to the Internet once more.

She finds far more than the book, published five years ago, implies.

Not as much as she'd have liked. Not really. 'Clump of dark matter passing through Solar System', read the headlines from three years ago. 'Gravitational anomalies frustrate scientists', the more recent ones say. But even there, something isn't quite connecting in Ami's mind, because that seems to be an understatement.

By all accounts, the results from all sorts of gravity-related experiments recently performed - especially the last few months, but beginning three and a half years ago - don't make sense. Not under general relativity, which worked perfectly fine until then, and not under any other framework the theorists have come up with. Journalists and physicists seem to be content with describing it as a set of oddities, but to Ami that reads like an extreme understatement. The popular press does not talk of a crisis in physics, and physicists being interviewed talk the matter down. But -

But Ami realizes immediately that this is something that undermines, if not the foundations of physics, then the first floor. There is a profound nagging discomfort about it, a certainty of something that should have been solid beginning to dissolve into an incomprehensible fluid.

The article titles grow somewhat more sensationalistic, for once, the more academic and arcane the source. Some of it is a happy excitement, the aura of scientific curiosity; some is a grim anxiety, especially among people who were late to admit something is happening. Names of trailblazers roll across the monitor - Kip Thorne, Radek Wojtak, Tomoe Souichi. Attempts at explanation, every last one running up against a world more complex than ever imagined.

Ami can't make heads or tails of it all, not yet; but she knows that doesn't mean she never will. More time is needed for the ideas to seep through her mind. Her classmates call her a genius, but she has metaphorically hammered her head at a conceptual wall too often to believe them. Even a thick wall can be broken, though, with enough time.

Ami has the time. And, more than that, she has the drive. She has discovered something intellectually strange that she cares about, that she intuitively senses the sheer importance of, but that she cannot instantly grasp. It is not the first time in her life she has experienced this, but it is by far the most intense.

When her mother returns, she's interested in what Ami has learned; but Ami can tell that she doesn't see the same importance in it that she does. To Mizuno Saeko, the paradoxical behavior of gravity is a curio, a museum piece, and something that will eventually be resolved without any effect on her medical practice. If the deviations are growing, in some cases exponentially, then it is likely because of compounding instrumental error. The world is not going to end.

Ami doesn't really believe that the world is going to end either, but who can know for sure? It's not, after all, a failure of precision, but a failure of replication, and who knows what other physical laws will decide to cease applying in the future. But she calms herself with the knowledge that the professional physicists aren't panicking, and they clearly know more than her. No need to descend into paranoia.

But still, so stuck between wonder and terror, Mizuno Ami can't help but feel a tremor of obsession.

* * *

As she sketches, from memory, the web of darkness that is spreading across Tokyo, Hino Rei takes time for the necessary reflection.

As Starguard Mars, she experienced something of a loss of control. She is not happy about that. After the thrill of that first meeting, she resolves to keep her wits around her to a better extent in the future.

She has no desire to lose herself meddling in affairs beyond her. It is not her place, even if it were someone else's.

But evil must be fought, and so Rei agrees to the 'test run', to track down the anomaly she found.

"Though," she says, "I'd prefer not to burn down any buildings."

"That's reassuring," Luna says.

And then Rei holds the pen, and says the words, and it's like waking up on her birthday.

Thoughts of resistance are discarded instantly. The power isn't something distinct from her, not really, and certainly not alive in and of itself, not without her to drive it. So Starguard Mars merely reminds herself not too act _too_ rashly, and then skims the rooftops, the black form of Luna perched weightlessly on her shoulder, exulting in the freedom but ever fixed on her goal.

Her target's location is slightly blurred.

"It just looks like a normal movie theater," she points out.

"Look at the people coming out of it," Luna says. "Do they look like they just watched a movie?"

They look, frankly, more like they just lost a family member. Every last one of them. But they aren't acting as if in mourning - rather, they're just stumbling along with exhaustion. As Mars watches, one young woman stumbles into the road, causing a mad swerve and a cacophony of honks by the nearest car.

Still, there are films that could, theoretically, inspire this sort of effect. More concerning than the theater-goers' mood is the haze of _something_ that Mars can sense over them, that she has no doubt originates from whatever the youma are doing to them.

"Looks bad, doesn't it?" says a male voice next to her.

Mars whips her head around to see a second figure crouching beside her and Luna. A young man, dressed in tuxedo, mask, and opalescent cape, with a knowing smirk on his face.

And the source of the perturbation she had been searching for.

"And you are?"

"Nameless for the moment," he says. "As, I imagine, are you. Shall we enter?"

Mars doesn't know if he's an ally or an enemy in the long term, and she can notice a deflection when she hears one, but for now she is glad that someone else seems to be concerned with the whole matter of a demonic invasion. "Let's," she says, and Tuxedo Mask (as she decides to label him for now) jumps down onto a balcony and leads her into the theatre's atrium.

No security guard stops them, because no security guard is awake. Mars suspects they could have gone through the front doors, had they wanted to. Rote motions, muttering under short breaths...

And at the center of it all, a demon poorly disguised as a movie advertisement.

Starguard Mars cannot hold herself back anymore, and yells out, as a challenge, the first thing that comes into her mind. "Who are you, to ruin the days of citizens that are only trying to enjoy a movie?"

She might have winced at how that came out, but two things prevent that. One is that none of the moviegoers react in any way, and the other is that the enemy does, by charging.

It's a roughly humanoid, or perhaps gorilloid, figure with black, flexible claws erupting from various parts of the body. It is massive, and so loud that people finally begin to flee at its coming, a black-haired woman Mars doesn't recognize guiding them. But Mars blinks, and calls forth purifying flame, and then the youma is burning - not set on fire by anything within reality, but simply incited to burn by her powers, an instant transition from 'not on fire' to 'on fire'. It lets out a frustrated wail and runs forward, Mars and Tuxedo Mask dodging in opposite directions, the latter whipping out a battle-cane and catching its foot with unusual agility. Agility that, indeed, is the equal of Mars's own.

Who _is_ this man?

The youma trips, and Mars, gaining a moment to restore her focus, inspires still deeper flame, while trying to contain its spread, turning the tongues back in on themselves and into the roasting flesh. It could make a decent meal, she thinks, but even as she does the youma begins to disintegrate into dust and ash, and the fire dies with it, and within seconds there is silence within the slightly singed theater once more.

Mars breathes in.

"Good," says the unfamiliar woman, coming up to her. "Though you should perhaps get the civilians out of the way _before_ starting the fight, in the future."

The realization doesn't take long. "...Luna." Mars nods. "Sorry, I - "

"Later - we should go. Everything alright?"

Mars assents, and leaves, but not before taking another deep breath, here, in the ash of her first battle, in the dust of her first slain enemy, in the first spark of a struggle that will define her.

* * *

Jadeite will ascribe the loss of Agent Kibin to police interference, at first, or perhaps a paramilitary response. Those happen - it is rare for the people of this millennium to fight back with any degree of success against the Shitennou's schemes, but certainly not unheard-of.

Time will act to correct that misconception. True, the memories of the witnesses will be less than crystal-clear; the exhaustion inherent in the siphoning of their mental energies is severe. But even if it will be as a dream, they will remember the monster that burned to nothing.

Formally, the report will be filed as a pyrotechnic stunt that went slightly out of control. But Jadeite will know, and know soon, that someone with access to technology far beyond that in common use on this Earth was responsible. Perhaps that would even be enough to convince the General that an analogue of Sailor V is active - Jadeite is better at deduction of that sort than he is sometimes given credit for.

But the truth is, events will move far faster than that.


	4. 1,02 - Weirdness Rising

1.02 - Weirdness Rising  
Monday, 7 July 2014

Dawn reaches its tentacles into the sky, lighting it up cloud by cloud. Then, like the horror it heralds, the sun rises, marking a path up through the southern sky. Gradually, Tokyo warms, and then, insomniac by insomniac, commuter by commuter, and ordinary citizen by ordinary citizen, the city wakes up.

Tsukino Usagi wakes up too, but unlike the miracle of last Friday, it is not on time.

She dashes through her morning routine in a panic, silently cursing the concept of Monday. Her parents take care of their own business with perhaps the slightest edge of bemusement. Shingo would be mocking her if he hadn't overslept himself. While he admittedly receives better grades than his older sister, he isn't any more of a morning person.

Everything is nominal in the Tsukino household.

So when Usagi rushes into school, still dejectedly frustrated at the prospect of yet another full week of school but taking solace in the proximity of summer break, and internally triumphant at beating the bell by a full two minutes, she does not yet notice anything odd. She enters homeroom, searching the room before finding Naru, who is on time as usual -

Outside her usual seat, near the wall.

Usagi frowns as she sits down next to her best friend. Something is off, and suddenly she's not sure last Friday was nothing after all. Naru's nose is buried in a book, at least, so that's fine, though Usagi doesn't recognize what it is except intimidatingly thick.

"Hey," Usagi pokes.

Naru looks up from the book. "Hi, Usagi."

From the tone, something is definitely wrong. But when Usagi queries, Naru says everything's fine. "Just tired," she says, hiding away the tome. She doesn't look tired, though, not exactly - more worn out by emotions, not by lack of sleep.

But the bell rings, and Usagi resigns herself to worrying until lunch.

"Do you know what's up with Naru?" Umino asks her, as she rushes to class.

Usagi frowns, not up to her usual disdain for the otaku. "You noticed?"

"A book like that?" Umino asked. "Of course I noticed."

"Naru reads a lot," Usagi protests.

"Sure," Umino says, "but in Japanese. Not some weird hieroglyphics probably connected to the kaiju cults."

Then it's time for math, and the frustration thereof, and if Usagi could have focused she would be distracted from the Naru question, but it's hard enough to focus in math most days and certainly now. So instead Usagi works out a plan to, during the lunch break, privately corner Naru and mentally plots the school building in anticipation.

But even alone, Naru denies everything. "The store's fine," she says. "Not great, because the sale went too well, but fine. Mom was maybe a little stressed, but nothing's wrong. The book's just supplementary material for studying."

Most people would believe Naru, at this point, but Usagi can see through it. "Don't lie to me, Naru," she says, tears in her eyes. "Please."

Naru sighs. "There's something," she says. "But I can't tell you. I mean, seriously can't. The police..." She shakes her head.

"I won't tell anyone, I promise."

Naru's terrified, clearly, but she shakes her head again, until Usagi is forced to desist.

"Please tell me when you're up to it," Usagi eventually says. "Or - or the police, if that'll help. They know what they're doing." And for a moment, she thinks Naru will release whatever dark secret she's holding in.

Then Kuri walks by, looking for them to speak about some new movie, and the moment passes, and Usagi is left with only the knowledge that something is very wrong and she can do nothing about it.

It is not a bright feeling.

* * *

Nephrite is not, altogether, surprised when Jadeite approaches him at court.

Beryl's darkspace court is a parody of what it once was. There are enough people, whether darkspace-born or Kingdom-born, in the Dark Kingdom to make up a nation, still, but the customs they are following were designed for the ruler of a planet, and darkspace is too hostile to life to support that sort of population. So the Queen of Earth sits on a makeshift throne in another Realm altogether, in a room that would echo with its emptiness if it could, and speaks to representatives of provinces that no longer exist.

Of course, some would be happy to stay here and rebuild. Nephrite has nothing but disdain for those cowards, and he knows the other Shitennou, whatever their differences, are in this the same. They have not gone into stasis only to abandon the Earth, no matter what its inhabitants have made of themselves.

Besides which, Nephrite doesn't find them _that_ bad.

Jadeite walks up to him in a colonnade, the palace stretching below them, a warped echo of Elysion, and only ocean to the other side. It is not the Last Ocean - it is not even water that swirls in its currents, but a 'molecule' of seven 'atoms' - but it is a fixed point of comfort in the course of their lives.

Jadeite very nearly pushes Nephrite through the railing and into it.

"You know the agreement," he spits. "Japan was _mine_."

Nephrite decides that if Jadeite wants to make a scene, he'll let him. "I accepted a resource you discarded," he said. "And you still dominate Tokyo. I proposed a cooperation, Jadeite, and I meant it." He had expected Jadeite to turn it down, yes, but he wouldn't have been displeased if it had worked either.

"And we could've had one," Jadeite says, "had you not seized the first opportunity to usurp me."

"You should be careful with that word," Nephrite warns. "We have equal rank, Jadeite." And Nephrite is more powerful as well, both in darkspace and on Earth, to say nothing of their capacities. Taking on the largest area of responsibility was a calculated risk, but it has worked out reasonably well for him. "And we fight for the same cause."

Jadeite nods. "We do," he says, "and you should remember that." Then he turns on his heel and proudly departs.

"I did," Nephrite whispers to the Pacific General's retreating form. "That's why I didn't wastefully kill a child."

They don't need to be monsters, not anymore. They aren't fighting Serenity anymore. And Nephrite is sure Beryl feels the same - otherwise, she would have translated an army to Earth instead of infiltrators, and the Shitennou would already be ruling the ruins.

What he doesn't know is what Jadeite is going to do now, because Jadeite is a fool, but not so much of one as to be predictable.

The truth is, as Jadeite walks on, the side of one eye tilted down at the waves of the ocean below, that the Pacific General is already scheming. He doesn't hold any malice towards Osaka Naru, or even towards Nephrite, and so he does not plot vengeance. Instead, he plots the removal of an infection before it can expand.

Instead, he calculates how he will take out Nephrite's toehold in Tokyo. Not directly, of course. A tip to the police while the youma presence is minimal, perhaps. Yes - surely there is something he can find, or manufacture, that is dubious about Osa-P Jewellers'. Especially given that its current owner is unfamiliar with modern Japanese bureaucracy.

A contained clash, Jadeite thinks, to prove to Nephrite that he is not to be trifled with. Then he can get back to business.

Because the endgame is getting closer, and Jadeite is not going to let this minor disagreement distract him.

* * *

Umino tries to scribble the hieroglyphics from memory, in the margin of his notebook.

Not kanji or kana, that's certain. Not the Latin alphabet, not Chinese or Korean, and it doesn't look like Cyrillic or Arabic either. Maybe just nonsense, a work of art? Umino doesn't want to detour too far from skepticism; if a straightforward explanation exists, he feels no need to invent a conspiracy. Despite his best attempts to shrug them off, the accusations in the cafeteria on Friday did affect him.

But all the same, there's clearly at least one conspiracy going on, and Umino has no intent to believe illusions of mundanity. If he's going to live in an imaginary world, it'd better be one more exciting than the real one, not less.

So instead, he accepts that Naru wouldn't be reading nonsense so obsessively, and commits to an investigation. Or, well, help Usagi with hers. He really doesn't want to be creepy, and Usagi's clueless but actually Naru's friend, so it'd be a perfect team-up. Any of his classmates being caught up in a secret society is a big deal, and -

And Umino wonders if his explanation on Friday attracted someone. The chances are minuscule, he tells himself. People talk about this stuff all the time, in public forums if not official ones, and they would've gone for him and not for Naru. Some guilty part of him, however, asks if that's a rationalization, if the situation is more dangerous than he imagines.

(No part of him thinks that they're just children, but if someone brought it up, Umino would certainly not be moved by that argument.)

Umino tries to summon his memories of inexplicable alphabets. It's an obscure enough topic that he doesn't remember reading much about it, but some pinpricks do remain. The kaiju cults, of course. The Kuritik aliens. And there was something about ancient Egypt, though Umino is pretty sure it was debunked.

"What're you drawing?" Tsunejiro whispers, peering over from the adjacent desk.

Umino pauses - Tsunejiro is a friend, but a distant one, and he's not sure he should be sharing this, for Naru's sake - but when in doubt, he prefers to be honest. "A book I noticed," he whispers back. "What language does it look like to you?"

"Hebrew, maybe?" Then Tsunejiro disinterestedly shrugs and goes back to his notebook.

Umino shrugs - he'll have to look it up. Regardless, he doesn't think Naru has any Jewish relatives, though Usagi would know better.

The teacher coughs, and continues the lecture. Umino quickly scribes the words without paying attention to their content. Trying to make sense of the alien script is probably impossible, but maybe it'll inspire a later revelation, and he really doesn't need the biology review they're currently getting. He's not the best student in his class, or even the second-best, but he's not so far off as to forget what a mammal is. Honestly, he thinks ruefully, anyone that does need the reminder isn't presently paying attention either. It's not that he denies someone might be getting something from this, but all in all, Umino can't wait for the test.

Even if some of his classmates look like they might disagree.

Umino catches up with a yawning Usagi after class. "Could you ask Naru for that book she was reading earlier?"

"Umino?" Usagi seems surprised at his presence. "Could you just leave Naru alone?"

"I'm worried for her," Umino says. "And for the rest of us."

"What?"

"Does Naru have any Jewish relatives? Or is she learning Hebrew for some other reason?"

"What? Of course not - I mean, Umino - "

"This is important!" Umino struggles to control his frustration, before deciding to stop bothering. "Usagi, something's very wrong in the world, and it has to do with your friend. I just want to help."

"I - " Something in Usagi breaks, at that moment, and she looks down. "Thank you, Umino. But I'm not sure how much you can help, to be honest."

"I know," Umino says, "Naru won't listen to me, but - do _you_ know what's going on, at least?"

Usagi doesn't answer.

"It's probably connected to the kaiju cults," he says. "I'll get you some articles on them."

Usagi looks very, very confused, but Umino realizes he's running late for class and dashes off through the hallway.

Their collaboration didn't quite get off on the right foot, he decides, but it didn't get off on the worst one possible either. That's good. Because as much as the image of Naru sprouting tentacles is fun to imagine, Umino suspects it would be associated with a lot more murders than he'd like.

* * *

Mizuno Ami sees Umino almost run into her as he dashes into the history classroom, and then _actually_ run into Tomoko, who makes some threat that she doesn't listen to.

She's been distracted today, even moreso than Umino seems to be.

Her mind is whirring, even now, trying to make sense of physical principles that scientists with ten times her experience struggle with. Unsurprisingly, it isn't particularly successful - though more successful, perhaps, than Ami currently believes. And as such, she knows, according to the mental flowchart she has been taught to follow in these circumstances, her priority is to ask for help. No one at this school has time or interest in providing it - even Kishi Etsuko, by far the best of the school's science teachers, made it clear that she could not give anything to Ami except encouragement. Encouragement is nice, of course, but it is nothing compared to insight.

And so, she decides, she will go to Moto Azabu High School (it being the best high school within walking distance) and - what? There's a meeting of a robotics club this afternoon, and while the relation is distant she still thinks that, maybe, there will be someone that can help. It's a dubious hope, but she's come to the conclusion that it's the best she has.

The difference between coming to a logical conclusion about what to do and casting herself into an unfamiliar meeting full of strangers is, however, an extremely sizeable one.

So perhaps the whirlwind review of Japanese history up to the Sengoku period doesn't quite settle inside her mind. She tries to take enough notes to go over later anyhow.

(She doesn't need to. She really, _really_ doesn't need to. She even knows that she doesn't need to, that she knows everything that will be asked on the test - but it's not about the test, not really, it's about a state of understanding, or a pursuit of understanding, that she can't quite express, something less than pure curiosity but more than a mere competitive instinct.)

The final bell is a relief - less because it brings the moment that Ami will confront her fears at last, and more because it is a distraction from her latest attempt to solve, or at least understand, an equation that she's pretty sure is unsolvable in principle. Diving into the mathematics is something she'd been trying to avoid, but after a certain point it seems obligatory, given that anyone that seems to understand half of what they're talking about seems to be writing more equations than words.

She doesn't even consider giving up, though. Everything she has come to understand about the issue has only made the Dark Anomaly, as some of the scientists are calling the phenomenon, seem more important, not less.

So Mizuno Ami follows her plan as it carries her, up to the point of knocking on the door of Classroom 17 at Moto Azabu High School, which connects to the machine shop, stumbles through her rehearsed speech, and steels herself for disappointment, which does not fail to arrive. There's a few token acknowledgements of the curiosity of it all, and a joyful demonstration of the robots themselves, which Ami is duly interested in; and all in all it's a nice distraction, but like all distractions it's one that she knows she'll have to cut short soon.

Until one of the older boys, Arakaki Kaichi, rather abruptly asks about her actual project.

"Huh," he says after Ami's explanation. "Mamoru! You're supposed to be the physics genius, you explain this."

Chiba Mamoru is sharply dressed, impressively fit, and all-around attractive enough that even Ami can't fail to notice it. He's also clearly less interested in Ami's explanation than his friend. "What did you say your name was?" he asks after a moment.

"Mizuno Ami."

"Okay," Mamoru says with a nod. "So why is this important to you, specifically? Are you doing a project?"

"Maybe?" Ami says. "I mean, mostly it's something that's left me confused."

"You're not the only one," Kaichi says.

"It's probably pretty simple," Mamoru says. "But that doesn't mean I can switch the track my mind is on within seconds. Which is to say, Kaichi, that you shouldn't have thrown a physics problem at me if you wanted me to get anything done on the sumo bot today. And for the record, I'm not a tutor - my help is a one-time thing only."

Ami nods.

"Good," Mamoru says. "Then let's begin. Preferably somewhere with less noise."

* * *

Chiba Mamoru takes embarrassingly long to realize that it's not actually simple, not anything like it, and that the middle-school girl is asking him about graduate-level research that she nevertheless understands better than him.

"So how did you stumble onto this?" he asks, trying to stall for time as he works out a polite admission of staggering overconfidence.

Ami's reply makes it clear that he's not actually dealing with a random middle-schooler, which is again something he should have recognized earlier. Even he doesn't spend Saturdays reading physics books for fun - well, not without reason, at least. "Your parents - "

"My mother was at work," Ami says. "She's a doctor."

"Your mother is Mizuno Saeko?!"

Ami nods, and Mamoru mentally rearranges his plans again. This time, it's the vague hope of making a connection with a notable doctor that can help him discreetly regarding the whole alternate-personality business. It's all somewhat tenuous, but he decides that doesn't matter.

At the same time, it's also a selfish reason. So Mamoru resolves to let it end here. "Okay," he says. "Anyway, I was wrong, earlier. This is... really complicated."

"So you can't help?"

And Mamoru realizes that he's trapped himself, because even he won't be able to forgive himself if he leaves Ami in tears. "I don't know," he says. "I'll try to help, okay? I'm just not sure I'll be much use."

"Two minds are better than one," Ami says, and that is that.

Mamoru wonders if she played on his emotions intentionally. Probably not, he concludes. He checkmated himself into helping with a middle-schooler's research project, and he has no one else to blame.

At least she's cute, a part of his subconscious notes, though that's another thought he makes an effort to not let affect his decision calculus.

Especially because he strongly suspects that someone will try teasing him for it.

He tries to dig into the topic, anyhow, guided by what Ami's already found out. Most of what he does during that hour is retracing Ami's steps and trying to integrate them with his understanding. The grand question that he confronts, though, is less Ami's concern for what is going on and more a question of why on Earth he doesn't already know about it. This is the sort of thing that should, he feels, intuitively be either covered up under a giant classified tarp and used for developing post-nuclear weapons, or be the subject of talk shows. Scientists are generally reluctant to make physics look bad, yes, but there's got to be _someone_ in the media that thinks they can make money off it!

The truth is, Mamoru is already pretty certain that he will need weeks to make any progress at all on the physics; but then, physical theories being upturned is not impossible. General relativity itself did that, and quantum mechanics, and really every single scientific advance in history, by definition, broke something that went before. The hypothesis that a clump of dark matter is passing through the Solar System seems reasonable enough; and if its effects are bizarre and unpredictable, well, there's a reason they call it dark, and it's not just its lack of interaction with electromagnetism. Perhaps, Mamoru allows himself to imagine, there is truly interesting structure in the dark matter. Perhaps even life...

But the point is, weird new physics is, to him, neat but not paradigm-shifting. The reaction to it is a different matter. For a moment, Mamoru entertains the possibility that his alternate personality can be used as a metaphor, here, but he recognizes that he's trying to fit together pieces of different puzzles. Ten days - that's what he decided then. Ten days of being Chiba Mamoru to the best of his ability, and of preparing failsafes.

And then he will dive deep into the memories that are not his, and whoever emerges will emerge, and he can only hope it is Chiba Mamoru.

So Mamoru allows himself to be dragged along by Ami's enthusiasm, and they swim together through seas of physics neither understands, and for an hour and a half they are busy with unpacking the insights that have led physics here, and for those ninety minutes Mamoru convinces himself not to worry and to leave be the paradoxes of his own life for the paradoxes of the whole world, which is a far more relaxing thing for them than it may sound.

But - in the end - Mamoru leaves, and goes home, and works on a different sort of difficult problem - that of defining himself. Because, he thinks, it is not impossible that he can reach a mental state where the personality shift can't reach him. It is perhaps a vain hope, but he would take almost anything over seeking help.

Perhaps that is because of his fear that his other self is doing something punishable.

But perhaps it is merely because he does not want others, even friends, to define for him who Chiba Mamoru is - not again.

* * *

Hino Rei enters the House of Fortune cautiously.

She's certain enough that it's run by a fraud. Actually having precognitive abilities tends to sour one on the usual tricks - the statements that apply to almost everyone but that seem personal, the readings of appearance and personality, the straight-up guesses. And the House of Fortune is far too materialistic, far too marketable, for her to see anything else in it.

Except, that is, for the trace of 'realm interaction', as Luna put it, that seems to be present within, an indicator of youma activity. And if that wasn't enough, a trio of girls at school almost broke the walls down in their excitement about their supposed futures. There's very little doubt in Rei's mind that something is very wrong with the House of Fortune.

After the mess that was her first night, though, she has insisted on investigating as herself first.

Luna is somewhere on the roof, or perhaps sneaking through the halls. She's around, either way, and so Rei takes in the line. It's unreasonably long and rowdy, full of people chatting about previous fortunes, with an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival and a riot. The walls demonstrate the same, with slogans of vague rebellion scrawled across clowns and animals. Rei can't detect any coherent ideology in them, mind you, but the dents in those walls, some apparently made with baseball bats, speak to more than peaceful protest.

Given the general atmosphere, Rei ultimately decides that no one will particularly care if she sneaks out of line and snoops around. She's mostly correct in that, though people are quite careful not to let her cut in line, at least.

What stuns her, though, is the state of the line _out_ of the building. All the excess energy seems to be gone out of them; instead, they quietly shamble along, even the true children among them.

It's eerily similar in some ways to the movie theater. But the difference is that, by the time that customers reach the street, they seem to have more or less recovered. So Rei mentally lists it as some sort of energy drain, and moves along to peek at the actual fortune-telling procedure.

It looks much, much more like hypnosis. Indeed, from a distance, Rei isn't sure any fortune-telling is actually going on. There's a machine, a vaguely human, shadowy form observing, hypnotic chanting, and a slow slouching of the fortune-receivers from overly energetic to nearly unconscious.

Forget this, Rei decides.

"Mars Power, Make Up!"

The world is fire, furiously tearing away the mask of deception that the youma have built up here, and burning away too the mask of passionless cold that is Hino Rei. This operation is a betrayal, of both marketing promises and the world itself, and through a storm of red dust Starguard Mars's determination charges forward, resolving not to give a single grain to evil.

Conveniently for her conscience, the monster attacks first.

It's a running battle, as brief as it is intense. Mars immediately draws the youma away from the customers, and the youma obliges. Neither can clearly see the other in the complex architecture of the House of Fortune, and enough of it is wooden that Mars is worried about setting it on fire anyway; but when a corner reveals a second youma, Mars sighs and invokes flame. The flesh first erupts in black bubbles, and an instant later fades into dust.

But a spark lands on the carpet, and ignites it.

Mars doesn't hesitate - she almost can't hesitate. She does her best to transfer the small flame to the remaining youma. It's tricky, because she has no idea what she's doing, because moving heat and reaction through air is in a certain sense impossible - but like a fuse, the flame dashes across the floor, leaving the carpet split in two by charred threads but not starting a conflagration, and leaps onto the youma's foot. It goes out almost immediately, but by that time Mars has taken the opportunity to light up its interior, turning it into a furnace, and after frantically dodging the first and last volley of spikes, ejected with a sound like gunshots, she rolls upright to see only ash in her enemies' place.

Only ash, and, as she quickly discovers, a growing riot.

The sounds of fighting did it, perhaps, or maybe it was the hypnosis, or most likely some combination. Regardless, there's a stampede, and Mars realizes that while she may have narrowly avoided burning the building down, there's still going to be deaths if she doesn't act fast.

So, once again, she doesn't hesitate, dashing from point of contact to point of contact until she is overlooking the part of the crowd heading towards the back exit. "Stop!" she yells, and they stop.

Perhaps it's the authority of her voice, perhaps her unlikely perch on a beam that would have difficulty supporting a clumsy cat, perhaps the brevity of her skirt - at the moment, she really doesn't care, so long as they listen.

"I'm Sailor M," she declares, as more or less the first thing that comes to her mind. The enemy will realize the similarity with Sailor V soon enough anyway. "This fortune house was used as a front by criminals." Technically true, and she's sure that the police will find _something_ incriminating in here, if they search hard enough. "Also, I'm not sure it satisfied building codes. Please evacuate calmly!"

On the way to the other door, she burns the mysterious, empty machine down, just in case; it doesn't turn to dust, but she's satisfied enough that it's non-functional. Soon enough the building is clear, and Starguard Mars - Sailor M - is sitting alongside Luna on a roof, four blocks east of the battleground.

"So what were you doing?"

"Investigating," Luna said. "I'm mostly a liability in combat, for you. The police are going to find plenty of drugs there, though it certainly wasn't the youma responsible for them."

"Should I have stayed behind and - "

"No, no. The police will get statements, and the existence of Sailor V will cause them to... not trust you, not necessarily, but at least start from a positive place. But we have to work independently, because we're not really after the same thing as they are."

Starguard Mars nods, and watches as, on the western horizon beyond the House of Fortune, the sun descends, cloud by cloud, and the red tentacles of dusk recede from the sky, leaving behind the quiet blanket of twilight.


	5. 1,03 - Battle of Legends

1.03 - Battle of Legends  
Wednesday, 9 July 2014

Fukuda Yuya is not, necessarily, the most conventional officer in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. He is, indeed, the sort of maverick with movies made about them that make their bosses gnash their teeth.

But in the age of Sailor V, the bar for mavericks is set a great deal higher.

Yuya takes some moderate pride in not falling to a trend started by a teenage idol. He's the same officer as he ever was - well, perhaps a bit more brusque than before, but that's just age and hard-won experience. So when he follows a tip to meet with an ominous informant, who he knows next to nothing about, he does so with a cigarette between his lips and cynically wary eyes.

To his surprise, though, nothing goes wrong. The informant walks past him and silently hands him a folder. A young man, with curled hair and a proud gait.

"Wait," Yuya says, quietly by clearly, before the stranger can leave. "Where do I find you in the future?"

"I'll find you, if need be," the informant says. "Call me Akbar."

Yuya is unimpressed, at least before he looks into the folder. Most of it is information the department already has, true, but a random civilian wouldn't have it, that's for sure. The centerpiece of the collection, though, deals with Osa-P Jewellers', a family store in Azabu-Juuban that apparently serves as a front for - what?

Not the yakuza, at least Yuya hopes not. Really, some part of him wonders if he should just go ahead and call in the Naicho, because he sure doesn't want to wind up tangled in international politics. But then, he considers, that's his supervisor's business. And if that supervisor viewed the whole enterprise as an obvious waste of time that was also, simultaneously, somehow a trap - well, Choei was arrogant, but he was no fool; he wouldn't admit when he'd been wrong, but neither would he ignore the information.

And so, with the folder safely in hand, Fukuda Yuya rides back to the police station. A block away, 'Akbar' enters a nondescript office building, rides up to the fourth floor, and climbs into a large seat with the appearance of a dentist's chair.

Then he presses a button, and Jadeite is in darkspace once more, not even the residue of his hair dye left behind. (Or is it Jadeite? There is continuity of consciousness in the translation process, but no continuity of body. Certainly, the heart of his darkspace self is beating so slowly as to indicate something wrong if it was doing so in realspace, and his breathing is disturbingly deep, taking in the marginally overviscous air. Jadeite is still somewhat disturbed by this, by the imprecision of the transformation. It is an endless reminder that he is not human, not when he is in darkspace, and an endless source of doubt as to how much of himself he has retained. To sink into madness is not a fate he envies, to be sure.)

It's not anything personal, really. Nephrite pushed his borders, and Jadeite is obliged to push back, but he doesn't imagine the police raid is even going to encounter any youma, much less be responsible for any deaths. After all, Jadeite thinks, Nephrite has no reason to really push for Tokyo, or any of Japan for that matter.

And thus, in a world that is not quite reality, driven by a belief that is not quite accurate, a general that is neither quite human nor quite youma walks across a bridge, tersely dictating orders to his subordinates, gears of his mind grinding timelessly. And in a brief spike of doubt, he wonders whether, in this displaced universe he has awoken into, there is even anything of Earth's light that still remains, whether he still has a dream worth fighting for, or whether all he is doing is repeating slightly different motions of the person he once was in a futile grasp at the forever-lost past. This Earth disgusts him, as do the youma that follow him, but he is not quite sure that he should not also disgust himself.

But he is not so weak as to dwell on such melancholy.

With a forceful blink of slightly reluctant eyes, Jadeite refocuses his mind on arranging the purchase of a minor mining company in Chile, and leaves his doubt behind with the lost glories of the past it is born of.

* * *

Two days after Naru entered her mysterious phase, Tsukino Usagi is beginning to wonder if Umino might be right that there's some sort of conspiracy involved.

Naru isn't behaving that weirdly, not anymore. But even so, something has clearly disturbed her. She isn't bringing the foreign book to class anymore, but Usagi catches a glimpse of her notes at one point, and they aren't entirely in Japanese.

Umino has a million crazy theories, which Usagi nods at and otherwise ignores. But something's wrong, and it looks less like Naru joined a gang and more like she joined a cult.

All of that makes the upcoming literature test seem relatively small, but the teacher makes it very clear that it shouldn't be treated as such.

"Could I come over to your place to study?" Usagi asks as the bell finally, finally rings.

"I - uh - I'll be busy tonight," Naru stammers. "Sorry, Usagi, I just..." She doesn't finish the sentence, at least not before the crowd of jubilant students closes up around them and floods out of the school building.

That triggers enough alarm bells that Usagi decides to throw caution, good sense, and even confidentiality to the wind and finally talk to her parents.

She walks home just a little faster than usual, propelled by concern for her friend. The upcoming test has fled her mind entirely. Nevertheless, she isn't completely blind to her environment, not like she was on Friday - ultimately, she decides, that high-schooler might have been rude, but he was kind of correct that she shouldn't throw her failed tests at people. Or her successful ones, for that matter. Perhaps it would even have all led to some resolution to change herself to be more perceptive, in the hypothetical where Tsukino Usagi (firstly) made such resolutions and (secondly) wasn't panicked for another reason.

She dodges Shingo as she gets into the house, and asks to talk to her mother privately.

"What is it?" Tsukino Ikuko asks.

"It's Naru," Usagi admits, and explains everything.

Her mother shakes her head at Umino's antics, even his relatively valid points. "Maybe you should try reading a foreign book sometime," she says. "But yes, the rest of it does sound somewhat worrying. I'll call Naru's mother, okay?"

Usagi waits for two hours as her mother makes the call, barely making any progress at all on her homework, and that only if doodling cats counts as progress. She waits in vain. According to Naru's mother, the issue has to do with a cousin dying, and Naru being dejected for that reason. If Usagi believed it -

Well, it doesn't matter, because she doesn't. She doesn't believe that Naru would play a prank on her like that, either. Her mother is wrong, and Umino is right, which is an unusual state of circumstances but hardly an implausible one. The adults won't be of any help, Usagi is forced to conclude. It's up to her to find a way to help Naru.

Her, and - spirits help her - Umino.

"But we'll find a way," Usagi whispers into the air. "I promise, Naru."

* * *

Mamoru concludes that it would be much easier to just skip this and have a research montage. If only...

His enthusiasm for the project has waned somewhat, yes, mostly because his brain now hurts for two different reasons. Given that his math teacher says that anyone who claims to understand tensors is lying, including professors, and given that Ami is having to learn calculus on the way, he'd have expected her to be even more out of it. Instead, though, she seems to have held on to some nugget of undying fascination that keeps her focused on the plan.

Perhaps he just doesn't have the heart to tell her it's hopeless. But then, it's clearly not hopeless, not entirely. They're making progress, limited as it is. They have a list of names, and some nomenclature for what those names have done; they have a much better understanding of physics than even two days ago; and in addition, they have the ability to get along, which is worth a great deal.

If he's wasting his time, then, well, there's worse ways to do so.

"Large extra dimensions," Ami reads aloud. "Have you seen this one, Mamoru? There's a possibility of the dark matter being out-of-phase with reality. Though I'm not sure what that would actually mean."

"Phase," Mamoru ponders. "That's waves, right? Waves can be in-phase or out of it" - he sketches that on the chalkboard - "and I guess if there's waves going through the dimensions..."

"But that doesn't require anything about extra dimensions," Ami counterpoints.

She's not wrong. It takes a few more attempts to get at the point. "So... if there's an additional dimension, or more than one because why not, but the dark matter is elsewhere within it, and trapped to be there - "

"I don't think that's precisely what they're saying."

"I think it's close enough that we can get back to it later. Here - see, so the extra dimension looks like a circle, with the universe as a point on it. The point moves around the circle, but there's parallel universes that also move around it at the same speed. So we never run into each other. And right now one of the other universes that's close to our own has its own star system or something passing near the Sun."

"Oh," Ami says in a moment of epiphany. "That makes perfect sense... except that it's excluded, so that means it's wrong."

"This specific set of equations is excluded. Extra-dimensional theories seem pretty popular, though," Mamoru observes. "Although not everyone agrees." He coughs as he feels a pressure in the back of his head. A spiking pain, the same one that he gets whenever he tries to remember what he does at night.

No, he thinks. He can't. Not now, not in the university library where people can get hurt.

But then, suddenly, the pain is gone, lifting away in a moment of relief, and then, in a swirl of petals and shadows and gold, in a cascade of pride and responsibility and command, in a stone garden watered by nameless streams and lit by freezing lanterns - and then, in a moment of abrupt awakening, so is Chiba Mamoru.

* * *

Ami steps back in shock.

Her brain can't process what it's seen - literally, that is. Something happened to Mamoru, like an explosion of many-colored light, except that some of the colors were ones Ami had never seen before. But as she blinks it off, and Mamoru comes back into focus, she takes in how different he looks.

If it is Mamoru, of course. He looks similar, maybe a year or two older, but masked, wearing a tuxedo, and slightly different in enough ways that she'd rather take him for Mamoru's brother - or half-brother, perhaps, because there's also more subtle differences in the shape of his face and body. He looks human, but only barely.

"Who are you?" she asks.

"That," the masked man says, "is an interesting question. I'm not entirely sure myself, sometimes. Mamoru thinks I'm an alternate personality of his, but you've seen that it's more than that."

Ami certainly has.

"I don't think it's supposed to happen," he continues, "this amnesia that I've been having when I'm Mamoru. Like this, though, I remember everything - well, except for the important parts."

"So, wait," Ami says. "What is - what do you want?"

The masked man seems to look into the distance. "That," he says, "is something you're better off not knowing, I think."

And then he is gone.

Ami is fairly sure she's dreaming or, failing that, hallucinating. Or perhaps merely delusional, regarding the differences from that which has an entirely reasonable explanation. This isn't a subtle, deep wrongness of the sort that underlies the gravity paradox; this is garish, in-your-face wrongness. It's rude, and very likely faked, precisely because it is so obvious.

She isn't sure of proper protocol - not even proper medical protocol. Maybe it's a prank Mamoru somehow managed, of course. He didn't seem like that sort of person, but who knows for sure?

Yes, Ami concludes, she'll talk about this with Mamoru later. Tomorrow, say. And for now, she'll get some sleep, because it's gotten reasonably late and because nothing makes sense anymore.

The truth is, despite her best efforts, it'll be some time before anything makes sense to Mizuno Ami again.

* * *

Four paths through spacetime converge on Osa-P Jewellers' that evening.

One path leads out from darkspace, as two youma agents are translated back into reality, followed by the Atlantic General himself. Nephrite is here to check on his foothold in Japan. He could have, perhaps should have, delegated this, but it's a delicate point in time - there's a reason the store has been closed for three days. But now it's time to redecorate the store to a presentable state, and to restore the Osakas' life to something resembling normality. Naru is making progress, Naruru is blissfully ignorant, and Mayumi... well, at least she's not suffered any irreversible damage.

Another path leads from Moto Azabu High School, across the rooftops. Tuxedo Mask only seeks to check on the shop, to see if it has a connection to some operation of the Dark Kingdom; Osa-P is but one of half a dozen suspicious locations on his mental list. He does not know himself, but somehow he does know his enemy - the youma of darkspace, and their once-human allies, seeking the same crystal that he did.

A third path originates in Hikawa Shrine. Hino Rei is walking to the mall, Luna tracking along, Phobos and Deimos soaring above. She's confident, perhaps moreso than she should be. She has stopped two of the youma's operations, and neither of them have truly threatened her. Osa-P, she thinks, will be like the movie theater or the fortune-teller, and she will cleanse it as well, and there's not anything more to it.

The fourth path... The fourth path originates at the police station. The people walking it are numerous, well-equipped, and well-trained. They know of the suspicious sale and the suspicious closure, and they know there may be a very large beast that has Osa-P as its tail. They intend to talk first, and they do not expect to have anything come to a physical confrontation, but they are ready for that outcome as well, if need be.

It is, all things considered, to the misfortune of those walking all four paths that it is the first and the fourth that intersect the earliest.

* * *

Disaster comes in two varieties. One is a single, fatal moment, an onslaught faster than the mind can comprehend, a globule of the finite lanced through with something that appears infinite. Such stark endings come often when life finds a foothold in an environment it has not yet adapted to, nor adapted to itself. What follows is only aftermath.

The other type of disaster, trending more mundane in occurrence but no better at its worst, is the accumulation of a hundred mistakes, a cascade of errors - perhaps going unnoticed for too long, perhaps inspiring panic, but ultimately gorging itself into a frenzy.

It is the latter kind of disaster that determines the fate of Osa-P Jewellers'.

The police are on edge, but not prepared. Nephrite's agents are on edge, but not disguised. A glimpse, a scream, a beam of agony intended to incapacitate that's ablated by body armor. A door kicked in, a great deal of confusion from everyone involved. A gradual escalation to lethal force from the police, but a very rapid one from the youma.

In the end, it takes Nephrite five seconds to run to the storefront and take command, but by that point it is far too late to salvage the situation. All that can be done is to fight, and win.

And in that, there is no contest.

The Atlantic General scans the battlefield and instantly formulates a goal - kill them all, and then work out how to cover it up afterwards. Not the most insightful of plans, perhaps, but it's too late for diplomacy, and he's made it work before. "Cut them off," he orders in High Elysian, as he tosses a ball of plasma at an officer just as she's about to radio for help. She is at once electrocuted and burned, without the time to experience pain before death, and Nephrite is already picking out his next target while dodging out of the way of another's gun.

The massacre is swift, efficient. It is efficient enough to prevent the police for calling in help, and it is almost, almost swift enough to prevent them from receiving it.

* * *

Hino Rei transforms as soon as she hears the commotion.

Well, not quite in that same moment - she does pick out a relatively secluded spot first, namely an empty bus stop, and relies on Starguard Mars' innate speed to prevent any passerbys from calculating her identity, as that is a point that Luna has emphasized. But she does not wait long, because she can hear where the noise is coming from, and while it may be a mundane robbery, those are worth stopping as well, for maintaining her cover as a vigilante -

As soon as fire engulfs and lifts her into being Starguard, she realizes that it's very far from a mundane robbery.

She considers trying to snipe the youma from afar, but there's police officers losing their lives, and so she needs to gain attention. So she tracks fire from within her to the air, erupting in a massive fireball above the battle. For a moment, it shines bright as the sun, to the point where people on the streets below are shielding their eyes, and even the youma pause in awe and fear. And the light illuminates another figure too, whose hat Mars recognizes immediately.

But as all of this is happening, in the brief respite thus afforded her, Mars dashes to the crime scene.

(No, not crime scene, she corrects herself. It'll be a crime scene later, when everything is over and done with, when the blood has dried and the memories have ossified and a semblance of stability has been put in place. Right now, the plaza is nothing less than a battlefield.)

Tuxedo Mask arrives first, his cane pushing a youma down. As this happens, Mars invokes ignition, an iridescently armored youma glowing red-hot as it turns to dust from within, and dashes in, leaping into what she thinks, at least, is a reasonably heroic pose.

And a figure, seemingly human, in the middle of the fight turns on his heel and faces - not her. Not her, but Tuxedo Mask.

"And who are _you_ supposed to be?" he asks.

Tuxedo Mask steps forward, as Mars focuses her fire on another youma. "You won't get away with this, monsters!" she yells, the fight stoking her excitement ever higher, as Tuxedo Mask remains silent and whips out his cane.

His red-haired opposite smirks, and draws something that looks like a sword, and lunges forward as fast as Mars can see, Tuxedo Mask barely blocking the blow.

But he has his struggle, and she has hers.

Fire appears in complex patterns - kanji, Mars notes, or characters at the very least, written less in flesh and more just in space, burning too briefly to be certain of what they say. She forces them to pop up within the youma flesh, causing stumbles and winces, not incapacitating but slowing. The remaining police officers back away, too panicked to either run or fight back.

Did training not prepare them for this, Mars wonders? And what prepared _her_?

She suspects she knows the answer, and she doesn't like it.

There's too many of the youma, though, and Tuxedo Mask is still busy with the leader. Mars has no time to take them down one by one, and a variety of weapons is already being discharged at her. She dodges, of course, dodges easily for the most part, but it's another distraction. A wall of fire, she thinks, and ignites the air around herself. The heat does nothing to hurt her, and indeed she feels like laughing in victory, but some of the exotic attacks, at least, can get through, and so she is forced to dance out of the fire.

She'll have to get them one by one after all, she realizes. It's not impossible, no, but while she has the reflexes she doesn't have the self-awareness that comes with repetition. Even as a porcupine-like youma turns to dust with a modicum of concentration, she sees another police officer go down. How many are left - three? Too few, regardless. She came here to save them...

And then she hears a crack, and despite herself notices, out of the corner of her eye, that Tuxedo Mask's cane has broken.

* * *

All in all, Tuxedo Mask considers as his lives flash before his eyes, today could have gone better.

The red-haired general (Tuxedo Mask does not know the name of his enemy, not consciously, but he still has the memory of his friend inscribed on his mind, and so despite those memories being buried deep indeed there is some awareness of his foe in Tuxedo Mask's movements if not his thoughts) is fast, as fast as he is; and he's a fair amount more skilled, as much as that's uncomfortable to admit. It's a struggle just to keep him back and let Sailor M deal with the youma - a struggle that his enemy, now, has all but won.

But not won. Not yet.

Tuxedo Mask grabs the broken piece of the cane, willing it to regrow. He knows, intuitively, that it should be capable of that, perhaps even quickly enough for combat. But at the same time he's rolling over in the hope that his opponent can't track him quickly enough to throw his energy spheres, and the hope is vain, and he can see him raising his arm -

And then a fireball flies in, his opponent easily dodging but losing time. The youma advance towards the hapless police officers -

"Run!" Tuxedo Mask yells at them. "We can't win here!"

That seems to shake them out of stupor. It does the same for him, as well. The enemy fires one last blast at the police officers, but Tuxedo Mask is there, his cane placed to deflect it, and when he strikes again, in a last flurry, it's enough to clear the space needed. And then they're away, and Sailor M is at his side, and the youma have stopped fighting. As have they. It's a standoff now, and his breath is heavy and burning and so, so dramatically alive.

"I was serious, by the way," the enemy leader says as the remaining youma close ranks around him. He seems to be the only person on the battlefield not to be exhausted. "The two of you are a fascinating sort of mystery. A bit violent, but then, who isn't in these times?" He hums a note Tuxedo Mask can't quite place. "We could work together, you know. It's not a law of the universe that we have to be enemies."

"Never, demon," Sailor M pushes out through gritted teeth.

"And you?" He turns to Tuxedo Mask, his gaze piercing. Tuxedo Mask wonders if the foe can see any more than is known to himself.

"That depends," Tuxedo Mask says, his voice level. He knows the Dark Kingdom, in principle; but he does not know their current state. "On what you want, I mean."

Sailor M sends him a scandalized look. Tuxedo Mask just hopes she doesn't derail the conversation, though, and she doesn't.

His enemy smiles as he begins his monologue. "What do we want?" he asks. "To bring back the glory of the past whose broken fragments you now wield. To let Earth live, in the manner that will make its current state seem like death. You understand something of what I speak of, I think."

Does he?

Tuxedo Mask mulls over those words. They strike a chord with him, he doesn't deny that. The Earth Kingdom was wondrous, once - without poverty or disease, piercing the worlds and the realms, creating wonders of every art imaginable. But the Dark Kingdom is not the heir of that legacy, only its despoiler. He knows that, knows the desire for vengeance fastened to his heart. If they really did learn, then - but he doubts they did, from those words.

Sailor M seems taken aback for a moment before retorting. "High words, for one who slaughters police officers for taking a look at his work."

"I would prefer a peaceful transformation," comes the response. "But those, alas, are rare. The current order must be changed, in places violently - but not in the main. If we had wanted to lead armies from darkspace, to lay waste to the planet, then Queen Beryl would already have reclaimed her throne." He shakes his head regretfully. "You have potential, both of you. You could take your rightful place, and help us preserve that which you most treasure of this world, instead of struggling hopelessly against a change greater than you can comprehend."

"No," Sailor M says, though her retort lacks true conviction.

Tuxedo Mask looks down at his cane, and sees that a flower has grown out of it. It is a rose, of sorts, though its petals wind in on themselves to an unreasonable extent and its thorns are arranged in tight spirals.

He shakes his head. "Listen to yourself, Nephrite," spills out of his mouth. He does not know why he chose the name, but the foe steps back in shock upon hearing it. "Do you really still believe you're the hero here?"

And, suddenly, Nephrite's expression contorts in deeply hidden rage.

"Endymion was a fool who cast the system into war," he said. "But he was a million times the person you will ever be. Do not imagine you understand a fraction of what happened, in those days, whatever traces you may have dug up. Now - are you going to leave us be, or do we need to resume our tussle?"

They choose the former, walking together along the vacated street. Tuxedo Mask, on instinct, plucks the flower off his cane and hands it to Sailor M.

She is nonplussed at the gesture. "Seriously?"

Tuxedo Mask shrugs, as they turn a corner. "Take it as a memory," he said. "And as a reminder that we should really talk sometime."

Which is when they walk into the police cordon.

"Yes," says a policewoman stepping forwards from it. "We really should."

Sailor M throws an anxious glance at him. He throws an equally uncertain one back.

"Don't worry," the officer says. "You saved three of our officers' lives back there - we know you're not the enemy. But we'd like to know who is."

"Not all truths should be shouted," Tuxedo Mask says, looking around at the number of officers. "But we should, ah, decide on a time."

The officer nods, and they do.

They listened in on most of that last conversation, in turns out. Enough to know the offer the two of them turned down. To deal with the Superintendent-General of the Metropolitan Police is big, yes, but Tuxedo Mask increasingly feels like it's they that are operating on the greater scale.

The first drops of drizzle are dripping down from a dark sky by the time they're done. Unbeknown to them, Nephrite is already evacuating Osa-P Jewellers', cursing his luck and whoever set this up. (Probably Jadeite, he knows, but there's certainly other people it could have been.) Mizuno Ami is nervously lying under the covers and trying to reassure herself that she's not going mad. Tsukino Usagi is frantically finishing a homework assignment and trying to come up with a plan regarding Naru. Jadeite is impersonating a reviled Australian lawyer, finding it all too easy to feign his complete misanthropy. Kino Makoto is fighting a punching bag and trying to predict which school she'll be transferred to next.

And as to Sailor M and Tuxedo Mask, they bid farewell to each other, neither certain, both hopeful, and set off on their separate paths through the night. They lost the battle, tonight, up against a foe they still know too little about. Yet they cannot help but feel they are making steps towards winning the war.

Even if neither of them is yet truly sure what, or who, this war stretching forth from prehistory is actually about.


	6. 1,04 - Who I Am

1.04 - Who I Am  
Thursday, 10 July 2014

Two figures stand upon a floating platform in darkspace, staring at a horizon dimly, and greenly, lit by distant castles.

"One last time," Naru requests. "To say goodbye."

Nephrite accedes. He understands the tension between the inability to let go and the inevitability of doing so. And Naru is by any measure blameless for her situation.

Which is not something to take pride in, mind you. Any decision deserves blame from _some_ perspective; to be blameless is to be powerless. Given Naru's age, this is understandable, but it is still something to move beyond.

After.

For now, Nephrite invokes the translation protocols. The bodies of the general and the girl are moved through between darkspace and realspace, their constituents being subtly modified into matching analogues, preserving continuity of consciousness yet also maintaining viability. It is a miracle of a process, and yet it has to work perfectly every time, in this age (for there were of course plenty of early, fatal experiments). Even the Shitennou cannot afford to stay in realspace constantly, for there is too much to be done to forsake the infrastructure of darkspace. Some of their subordinates, those who are Earth-born, do remain almost always in realspace; it is not something Nephrite begrudges them. One day, darkspace will be left to those born of it, and for all its grim grandeur, Nephrite will not miss it; but for now, it is still the only place they can move openly.

Of course, it is not that he will ever be composed of one realm in the way of the Silence-born; while his body is localized in darkspace or realspace, because only the Star Seeds can pierce all Astral Realms at once, the other realms serve as bounds, or mirrors, or vents, for certain organs and organelles. Naru, by contrast, lacks that dimensionality, as a great deal else; she is far easier for the machines to translate, but also less unchanged in the transition.

Their bodies knit themselves together in Osa-P Jewellers', and Naru walks, as if entranced, up a stair to reach the roof. In the early dawnlight, she gazes at the skyline of the world's largest city, and despite all attempts by its grid to block her view, she can see enough to bring upon her the magnitude of what is happening. The school where she met the people who would become her world, the park with a statistically implausible concentration of amazing ice cream stands, the tower that has overlooked her entire life. They are leaving Tokyo, leaving Japan, and somehow that is more meaningful that leaving realspace entirely, to her shaken mind (in addition to being rather more permanent).

Downstairs, a youma brings Naruru in, in the guise of her mother. Naru hears her sister's words, spoken in a confused mix of Japanese and the English she is having integrated into her mind, but she can't work up the courage to come and face her, now. Instead, she looks at the bodies scattered around the street, and the police cars flashing from a safe distance away. Nephrite has already told her it was a misunderstanding, but then, she has also already had it hammered it into her that this is war.

She came close enough to dying, that first night, to not be surprised that others didn't surpass the threshold.

Tears are running down her face, the warm air rising in gusts around her. Nephrite's hair billows like clouds, his stance assured but dissatisfied like - well, like a general mapping a lost battle. Naru is small by comparison, and feels smaller, and yet for all that she forces herself to blink away the tears and look at Azabu-Juuban with clear eyes. She must not have the moment sully her memory.

"We will return," Nephrite promises. "Or you will, at least. This isn't forever."

Nephrite's forever is, of course, longer by far than Naru's. Not that she appreciates that, yet.

"Usagi," Naru whispers, trying to externalize her doubts. "Usagi, wherever you are... well, probably at home asleep..." She shakes her head. "Live. Grow. Don't do anything stupid... well, not anything _seriously_ stupid. And when we see each other again, whenever and wherever it is, I'll have so much to tell you - because we _will_ see each other again. No matter what this world, or any other, throws at us."

She thinks of the others. Rui, Kuri, Yukie, Yumiko. The teachers, too. When she thinks of boys, she's slightly disappointed that, really, the one she's actually interacted the most with was Umino. Her crushes won't miss her, and may not even have known she existed.

No - exists. She still exists. Everything around her may have come down in a weeklong series of disasters, but she's still there.

"Let's go," she says, forcing herself to turn to Nephrite.

Nephrite nods. "Let's," he says thoughtfully, contemplative of the debris his plots leave behind, the - in this case - quite living debris. Well, the living debris is more troublesome than the dead kind, but that doesn't make it less worthwhile.

He's still fighting for a dream, Nephrite, or at least he so tells himself. An ideal of the past. Naru, for her part, is fighting for people - herself and her family, mainly. She has not yet found her dream, where others have abandoned theirs.

They walk down the staircase, two outcasts of different Earths, their heads lost in the deceptive lies of the past, the shadows of those heads cast upon the remorseless reality of the present.

* * *

Two running figures meet, indeed almost collide, in the courtyard of a towering condominium complex.

"We'll talk inside," Mizuno Ami says, pulling Chiba Mamoru along after her.

"Your mother - "

"Is at work." Ami shakes her head as they enter the building and she summons up the elevator. "Just one question, first. Was I hallucinating?"

"Unfortunately," Mamoru says, "I don't think so."

Ami isn't particularly convinced by that. What she saw was impossible, and Mamoru isn't speaking like someone confronted by the impossible, merely by the highly improbable. The difference is far from insubstantial.

Mamoru hesitates before speaking. "Bouts of amnesia," he eventually forces himself to begin. "I think I have an alternate personality, generally active in the evenings. I can barely remember anything I did during that time."

"So how does that explain the tuxedo appearing from nowhere?" Ami's tone is artificially dispassionate, in the form that many of her peers interpret as disdain. Mamoru is more concerned with their substance.

He steps back. "What."

"You turned into - " Ami searches for the words - "some sort of supervillain. You looked different, even besides wearing the mysteriously appearing tuxedo. Then you said you were busy and left."

"What." Mamoru shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "That makes no sense."

"I know. It happened when you were discussing the extra-dimensional theories."

"That's the last part of our discussion I clearly remember," Mamoru agrees.

"_Possibly_ real, then."

Mamoru massages his forehead. "That's - could your mother comment on that?"

"It's not a medical problem," Ami says, icily cold because she's far too unsure of what is happening with her world to emote. "And if it is, I'm the one who's going insane. We need a..."

"A priest," Mamoru says. "Because apparently I'm possessed by a demon or something."

"You didn't look like a demon," Ami protests. "Also, I don't think a priest would actually know anything. At least not without looking at the transformation again."

"It makes no sense," Mamoru says.

"Neither does gravity. We don't turn to priests for that."

"Whatever. What did my alternate personality tell you, exactly?"

Ami tries to remember. "I asked him who he was, but he said he wasn't sure. I asked him what he wanted, and he said I was better off not knowing. He said you thought he was an alternate personality of yours, but that it's more than that."

"So they're spying on me," Mamoru says. "This is bad."

Ami shrugs - at the moment, she has far too little a clue as to what's going on to assume the existence of a 'them'.

She tries to work it out again, now that it's morning, to discern the lineaments along which the world is still cohesive, rather than being a collage of random sensations. Mamoru is, of course, doing the same. But Mamoru's mind falls reflexively on the patterns from fiction and games and other forms of stories, and so it's easy for him to see conspiracies. These are concepts which he never believed to be real, but that doesn't make them any less concrete. Ami, by contrast, has not had her imagination enriched - or perhaps polluted - by nearly as many narratives. To her, reality works on laws of physics, not laws of genre; and though Mamoru intellectually understands as much, he can swing along on the latter for a while as he deduces the former, as Ami cannot.

"Okay," she says, "let's see. The spontaneous appearance of a tuxedo is impossible, but maybe your alternate personality had it hidden away somewhere in the room. That doesn't explain the lightshow, though."

"Lightshow?"

"When you transformed."

"I'll say it again," Mamoru says, "this makes no sense."

"I know," Ami groans. "We should talk to an adult - not my mother, though, a teacher or something. I mean, this won't make sense to them either, but at least they can tell us who's the most likely to be able to help."

"No," Mamoru says. He struggles to express his reluctance in a fashion that isn't entirely selfish, in a way that doesn't unveil it for the denial it somewhat is. It's not a matter of admitting it to Ami, not really; it's a matter of admitting it to himself. "I... we need to keep this secret. I don't want everyone to know about this."

Mamoru expects Ami to argue, but she's far too disturbed to do so. "Okay," she says.

Mamoru glances at the clock. "Oh," he says. "I need to run. School."

Ami's school started ten minutes ago, and she doesn't know how she can explain the degree to which she is late. So she decides to stay behind, and apologize tomorrow, and search for anything that approaches an analogue to Mamoru's condition.

She will not find it, naturally, though she will find the points of reference, the boundary of normality beyond which Mamoru's situation strays.

For now, though, she is still hopeful, and gives only a single glance outside the window, where a lone figure runs across the courtyard below a henge of black towers.

* * *

Two figures brush by each other in the corridors of Juuban Municipal Junior High, two students that have little reason to deal with each other, though not as little as in the past.

Tsukino Usagi pins down the source of her concern immediately, upon coming to school. Naru's absence is sudden, and while there's a million common explanations, Usagi no longer trusts those where her best friend is concerned. Something very bad has happened, she suspects. She's not wrong, with that suspicion; then again, that's the type of suspicion that tends to be correct at all the inconvenient times.

Urawa Ryo, by contrast, takes a full half-hour to realize the source of his grumbling discomfort. He knows something's off, and when he realizes that it's not a 'what' that is missing, but a 'who', he can't help speaking up immediately - at least, not when taking into account the break for discussion they're currently in.

"Iguchi-sensei," he says, "Ami's absent."

"That happens. She's probably sick."

"It's Ami," Ryo points out. "She's never absent."

That's true enough. Still, there's a first time for everything, and so Ami's strange behavior the past few days is not taken by Iguchi Kensei as serious evidence, not until a second voice speaks up.

"Naru's missing as well," she points out.

"I did take attendance, you know," the spectacled teacher grumbles. But he knows full well that both Ami and Naru have close enough to a flawless attendance record as to make their simultaneous unexcused, unprovoked absences highly improbable.

Furthermore, it quickly turns out, Akiyama Tateo is also missing, and while his attendance record isn't quite as perfect as Ami's and Naru's, it's enough to provoke a very confused Iguchi Kensei to tell the principal that his three best students are all missing after a few days of suspicious behavior. "Probably some event," he says, "a math convention or something, I don't know."

"Probably a bug going around," the principal says, but she promises to make some phone calls anyway.

Usagi and Ryo sit uncertain, spiraling regrets in their minds. Everyone else seems to think it's nothing - Usagi finds herself even wishing Umino was in this class, so that she wouldn't be quite so alone. But Ryo and Usagi both know, deep within themselves, that something more profound is going on.

Tateo is the first case to be resolved - at home, with something that may be the flu, or at least an extremely bad cold. His exhaustion the past few days was probably a sign that he was already sick, and has infected half the school.

At this point, the concern drops off a cliff, and class resumes its normal course. This is accentuated by the quick information, soon after, that Ami is also okay, that she's busy with some extracurricular project and overslept. It's something her mother will no doubt be quite cross about, but Ryo is nevertheless firmly relieved.

Usagi is too, despite herself. When she asks Ryo whether Ami was reading books with weird symbols the past few days, he laughs and says that she probably was, not that he was paying attention, that it was probably mathematics textbooks. And Usagi's heart damps its oscillations, returning to an equilibrium of satisfaction. Nothing is lost - she's been imagining things again, listening to Umino's craziness, and Naru was probably just keeping a surprise regarding her own project or something -

Which is when she's called to the principal's office, and when she arrives there, wondering what she did wrong, finds two police officers standing there.

Usagi suspects that she is in a great deal of trouble. She will not be in the least relieved when it turns out she isn't.

"Usagi," one of the policemen asks her, "right?"

"Y-yes..."

"You said your friend Naru was acting weirdly these past few days..."

Umino is quickly dragged into the office as well, on Usagi's advice. Together, they reveal the results of their interrogation - though the conspiracy theories are quickly brushed past.

"It was probably a cipher," one of the officers muses. "A code, I mean."

"Officer," Usagi eventually asks, no longer able to contain her fear, "what happened with Naru?"

There's a dramatic pause. Usagi and Umino hold their breaths. Then there's a request for secrecy, and then the admission.

Naru, her sister, and her mother have disappeared. Last night, the police were investigating a rumor about Osa-P Jewellers'; when they got there, gangsters started a firefight. A perimeter was set up, but by this morning no one was there. They must've slipped away somehow. The Osakas' apartment is empty.

It's all delivered in clipped fragments. Police officers died, in the firefight, and so there's not all that much sympathy that Tsukino Usagi receives. But to be fair, sympathy wouldn't really have helped, because it would be false compared to what Usagi now feels.

Naru is gone. And it's because Usagi failed her.

It's beyond tears, beyond disaster. Usagi shakes off Umino's tactless attempt at comfort. What does he know? He searched for secrets and patterns, is surely searching for them even now, when Naru is gone and probably dead, and Naruru at that but -

There is so much that she should have done, and more that others should have.

There is so much that none of them did.

She walks out of the office moving on routine alone, even as the bell rings, even as Ryo walks out of class with the weight of the world off his shoulders.

When they brush past each other again, neither even notices it, their brief equality forgotten.

* * *

Two figures meet with concealed and mutual hatred, both shrouded in shadows real and figurative.

Sakurada Natsuna's hatred is immediate, even if some part of her finds it a misplaced projection. Eleven officers dead, only three survivors. The criminals, whoever they were, slipping away. Only a Sailor V analogue, and an even more inexplicable male vigilante, as the border between that and total annihilation of the task force. And Akbar making himself inordinately difficult to trace afterward, to boot.

Jadeite's hatred is not like that, not born out of anger at all but of disgust. To be sure, things escalated in a manner he isn't happy with at all. But if he has made a mistake, it is one he doesn't absolve himself of, and certainly not one to blame the superintendent for. Instead, his hate roots itself in the comparison to former peacekeepers, which paints Sakurada as simultaneously brutish, weak, and otherwise incompetent.

But both of them know how to hide their hatred, and furthermore, how to hone its unilluminated edge to a perfect weapon. And both, too, know well the cover they've ensured for this discussion; and so neither has any desire whatsoever to escalate the argument into a battle. So their discussion is, overtly, relatively civil.

Sakurada gives eleven names. Good names, proud ones, six of them with families and children they have left behind. Dead, based on Jadeite's false information. The threat is not entirely explicit, but not quite concealed either; Sakurada Natsuna believes that she has the resources to add Akbar to that casualty list.

The gesture is meant to enforce dominance and invoke sympathy. The former, of course, fails to do anything but crystallize Sakurada as a paltry ape in Jadeite's eyes. The latter does more - Jadeite wonders if he should feel something, for these innocent (relatively speaking) casualties. But he is not one to consider self-doubt during a heated negotiation, only after. So he files the thought away in a distant, but well-ordered, corner of his mind and focuses on the discussion at hand.

Jadeite - Akbar, as far as Sakurada is concerned - retorts straightforwardly by noting the danger his dossier pointed out. If the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department failed to properly take into account the error bars on that danger, that is their own fault.

The response is meant to give a logical defense, but also to egg the superintendent on with her own regrets. Sakurada doesn't rise to the bait. Instead, she focuses in on the unanswered question, which Akbar's dossier certainly did not say enough about: who are they fighting, anyway?

That's a question that Jadeite has no interest in revealing. It's easy enough to emphasize that he's risking himself to transmit even this much information, and that the police should be thankful for it. Sure, his manner clearly excludes the possibility that it's out of pangs of guilt - but does that matter to Sakurada Natsuna?

It doesn't. And so Jadeite zeroes in on this, and paints himself as an asset. He regrets that the enemy had forewarning of the raid, or perhaps was well-prepared by coincidence, but no one can say that his information about the importance of the target was false.

Neither brings up Sailor M, or Tuxedo Mask, or the matter of said enemy being obviously inhuman. It does not suit either of them to do so. So the pretense of the foe being spies or yakuza or some such remains. It is only a pretense, and both know the other knows it's a pretense, but neither is entirely certain that the other knows they know it's a pretense. And besides, neither wants to sound insane, even if it is only by outdated standards, because both expect the other to judge them by those standards.

The expectation, as it turns out, is rather misplaced, but that is a separate issue.

So the venom slowly drips out of the conversation's fangs. Sakurada Natsuna is mollified enough by Akbar's words to consider him an unreliable ally, rather than an enemy, albeit neither removes him from the category of threat. Jadeite is reassured - not so much that Natsuna is worthy of his respect, certainly not, but that she is no more deserving of derision than anyone else in this city, that she is not specially pathetic. Jadeite would not have handled this the same as his opposite in her place, but his behavior wouldn't have been _so_ different.

And so, when they part, when the ambushes and counter-ambushes breathe a sigh of relief that they were not necessary, on both sides - when it is all over, Sakurada Natsuna steels herself to once again deal with a teenage vigilante. Sailor M did not make as positive an impression on her as Sailor V did, too serious for her age and too straightforward for an adult... but she'll take that over Akbar any day.

And as to Jadeite, his preparations are of a different sort. Too many other identities to stop moving, really. So much he has the levers to affect, on this planet, but so slow that those moves have to be made, compared to the unfolding of those consequences. So Jadeite schemes.

Because he doesn't have all that many brushstrokes left to make, on the grand canvas of Earth. The endgame is not upon them yet, and Nephrite has delayed it still further, but Akbar's newfound placement partially balances that out. Money has long since stopped being a problem; influence, similarly. But people like Sakurada Natsuna still do not know who they will have to one day bow to.

So two figures part ways, the rancor between them thinned but not vanquished, and their adversarial cooperation knitting itself together from the fabric of shadows.

* * *

Two very different figures sit on the floor of a spartan bedroom, and stare at each other with alien eyes.

"Who am I?" Hino Rei asks.

In the living room, the television has been silenced. Rei is not entirely surprised to have heard her father rail against Sailor M on it. Luna is disappointed, but Rei knows that Hino Takashi had nothing good to say about Sailor V either, and she's rather more prone to property damage.

If her father will attack her now, for the most important thing she's done in her life, then that only confirms her opinion of him.

But Tuxedo Mask's presence, there at Osa-P, has somewhat ameliorated her feelings towards the rest of the male sex. He is at least an ally, though the flower... well, her heart did react to it in a rather more positive way than her reason.

"What do you mean?" Luna asks. She is not yet aware, not really, of the doubt that has sprouted in the soul of her - pupil? Subordinate?

Rei can't give voice to her true concern - she doesn't trust Luna enough, not anymore, to tell her that Nephrite promised her the very same things as Luna had. It is one thing for demons to lie, but quite another for their lies to so perfectly match angels' truths.

The reality, then, Rei concludes, is that there are no angels, no demons, only spirits with similar but opposed interests that are using this world as a battleground. And in that case, her duty is to the people of Earth, to the peace that is being broken.

Hino Rei is not entirely sure she is on the right side - or to be precise, she is no longer sure there is a right side.

So she sits, silently, and Luna sits silently opposite her, and Rei studies the alien spirit. "I act differently, when I'm Mars," she says. "Why?"

"I think it's not a matter of being Mars," Luna theorizes. "When you transform, you do not merely connect to the Star Seed; your body also changes, catalyzed by it, to become a Silver Empire human, rather than a human of this Earth. People felt more, back then. Fire and excitement, instead of lukewarm contentment. Greater victory and suffering, somewhat less anger... It was a better time. But I can imagine the disconnect is disconcerting."

What's more disconcerting is how much of this Rei has heard last night, from the general's lips. But, Rei reasons, her response wasn't wrong, not entirely. The general - Nephrite, Tuxedo Mask had called him? - was slaughtering policemen. The youma were draining energy from innocent customers. She, by contrast, hadn't been doing anything like that.

So she decides to be honest with Luna, for now. "The enemy that drove me back yesterday," she says. "Nephrite."

"Nephrite?!" Luna is stunned. The presence of one of the Shitennou is a dire sign, and Luna regrets even more that she hadn't reached the battle in time to witness it. But she understands the outline - Nephrite allowed his foes to retreat. A fortunate mistake, for the enemy to make.

"He said," Rei continues, "that they were bringing back the glories of the past. And perhaps it is all empty promises, but... how are we different?"

Luna wants to bite back with an insult. She lost enough friends in the war to have little patience for doubting the rightness of the Silver Empire's cause. But she is held back - both by the knowledge that she is dealing with the reincarnation of Mars, and more importantly by the awareness that this is a new age, with a new war, one whose allegiances are far more fluid.

So she restrains her anger. "The people of the Earth Kingdom," she says, "were the same as those of the Silver Empire. I imagine the things we miss about the past are very similar. But they started the war that brought about the end of that past."

"And you're killing each other for that past now," Rei says. "Even though you both want the same thing. And the present is caught in the crossfire."

"Do you really believe there can be peace with the Dark Kingdom?"

Rei thinks to the theater, the fortune-telling club, the battle before the jewellers'. "No," she admits. "They don't want peace, they want conquest."

"At best," Luna says, but doesn't elaborate.

"I know the Dark Kingdom must be stopped," Rei finally confesses. "But what will I become while stopping it?"

It is a foreign sort of question to Luna. Not the concept of monstrosity born of necessity - that challenge is a very nearly eternal one, and the ways to forestall it sometimes seem to come up devastatingly empty, as Silence showed. But that's not what Rei is afraid of, not really.

Rei is afraid of no longer being human. But she is speaking to one who is not human, and never was, and was at that born within an age when the definition of humanity was a far looser one. Self-modification was not universal within the Silver Empire, not beyond the standard package that had been entwined long ago and that birth mostly sufficed to pass on; nevertheless, enough of it was prevalent that Hino Rei still registered as human to Luna, for all the changes that Silence had made.

(Not, in Luna's view, that even the most demented citizen of the Silver Empire would have mutilated themselves into what humanity has become.)

So when Rei speaks, Luna interprets her as fearing transcendence. Because, true, the Mau have no true desire to protect the world from unnatural interference or any such nonsense. They do not seek to rule, but they do aim to improve, and sometimes those things are all too similar.

And perhaps they are more alike to the Dark Kingdom in this than they would admit to themselves.

(There _is_ a difference, though, and not a trivial one. A clarion, radiant difference, though not one Luna can formulate right now - the difference between true idealism, and the artificial kind. And besides, dark pacts always come due, and usually the price is paid by those who least deserve it. The Shitennou cannot ever achieve the victory they imagine - albeit even they do not know it.)

So Luna reassures Rei that the Star Seeds are stable, that they will not change her further, nor irrevocably, against her intent - something that isn't exactly what Rei wanted to be reassured of, but enough, for now. And the truth hangs unformed in the air between the two figures, unmoving, but ever-changing, just like life itself.

The Starguard Mars that Hino Rei becomes is not the same Starguard Mars that Luna of Mau once distantly knew. But then, the Luna that Hino Rei knows is, despite continuity, not truly the same Luna that once learned and dreamed and calculated in the Silver Millennium.


End file.
